[Development] Qt 5.2

[Ziller Eike]

On 25.06.2013, at 20:49, Knoll Lars <Lars.Knoll at digia.com> wrote:

> On 6/25/13 3:33 PM, "Daniel Teske" <daniel.teske at digia.com> wrote:
> 
>>> Our goal should be to release 5.2 in November, so we have a bit of slack
>>> before christmas. Unfortunately we'll also need some time to still do
>>> feature development, so the proposal would be to aim for releasing the
>>> alpha end of September.
>> Shouldn't there be a discussion first on what went wrong with the 5.1
>> schedule? 
>> Because clearly we are way beyond the end of april target.
> 
> Yes, quite a few things took longer then originally anticipated. The
> feature freeze did already happen two weeks later then originally planned,
> then it took quite some time to get the alpha and beta packages out. In
> the end we had a week or two of delays on every stage of the release and
> that added up.
> 
>> If there's no discussion on why that happend and how we are going to
>> improve 
>> the process, then this plan will be as unachievable as the last one.
> 
> This is something we'll need to discuss. The 5.1 plan was clearly too
> optimistic. So we need to go through the problems we had with 5.1 to make
> sure we don't repeat them if we want to have a chance to get 5.2 done in
> time.


Qt 5.1 alpha was released on April 8th, so assuming that the final can be released end of next week or beginning of the week after that, this cycle has taken about 13 weeks.

Qt 5.2 alpha end of september, final in november means about 8 weeks from alpha to final.  Even if the discussions on what should have been done better with the Qt 5.1 release results in changes that reduce the amount of time needed by 3 weeks, reduction by 1/4, which I'd claim would be a really great success (and unrealistic), that's still 10 weeks.

For Qt Creator we have a release cycle that has 8 weeks from BETA to final, with about two months feature development before that.  (http://qt-project.org/wiki/Releases)
This usually fits "just so", meaning that I would claim that it would be impossible for us to reduce that time, and that there is always the possibility for it taking a bit longer. And we also try to keep the "dev" version of Qt Creator working in a good state at all times (like the goal is for Qt).

Qt has many more shareholders than Qt Creator, much more code, much more platforms to support (and Qt 5.2 is supposed to get two more out of "experimental" state). And it has a CI that tends to slow things down.

To me it sounds very unrealistic to have a *shorter* schedule for Qt than for Qt Creator combining all these facts. (Shorter because we don't have alpha releases for Qt Creator, i.e. the 8 weeks are from beta to final.)

Br, Eike

-- 
Eike Ziller, Senior Software Engineer - Digia, Qt
 
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