[Development] Where and how does Qt define which platforms are supported?

[Vladimir Minenko]

Hi all,

during one of the last release meetings, we had a chat about "Tier 1" or reference platforms. I mentioned that IMHO the "Tier 1" notion known in Qt prior Qt5 is not used in Qt5 anymore. I was not able to provide references off the top of my head, and now I took some time to collect references. I post it now to the dev list to get feedback/opinions from all.

Since I was missing a reliable navigation, I used a search on Google with a limit in its scope:

* site:qt-project.org/wiki
* site:doc-snapshot.qt-project.org/qt5

I observed the following:

* The Qt5 documentation does not use the "Tier" notion to define levels of platform support. At least Google does not find the word "Tier" in docs. A grep over the entire source code of most modules does not bring any results either. Instead, "reference configurations" are defined: http://doc-snapshot.qt-project.org/qt5-nosubdir/supported-platforms.html

* The Qt Project wiki does know "Tier 1", but in turn, it does not know "reference configurations". Plus, it provides its own version of related definitions: http://qt-project.org/wiki/Platform_Support, including a dead link to Qt docs (I was about to correct it, but did find that page in docs anymore). The wiki also mentions the key word "Tier" on a few other pages, e.g. http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt-Quality-Gate-Criteria

* Still, the context of Qt5 apparently has some traces of the "Tier" definition, e.g. it names Windows Embedded Compact 7 a Tier 2 platform, see http://qt-project.org/wiki/New-Features-in-Qt-5.1

Finally, a search over emails on the dev list (site:lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development) brings more classifications/proposals:
http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2012-November/007876.html

The purpose of this email is not to point out something what is not done or wrong. The purpose of this email to initiate a discussion and a work to get this done and create a clear definition where Qt runs on and how related platforms are classified.

Opinions/feedback? Who is going to join a work on this? Can this topic get on the todo list for the final 5.2 release?

Thanks!

--
Vladimir
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