[Development] Proposal: All Qt modules must use the same version number

[Koehne Kai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: development-bounces+kai.koehne=digia.com at qt-project.org
> [...]
> We'll always have a 1-to-1 mapping of QtWebEngine and Qt versions and
> we'll always distribute/test them together. If we release QtWebEngine 1.u.v
> with Qt 5.x.y, then QtWebEngine 1.u+1.v will also depend on Qt 5.x.y.
>
> The two advantages that this gives us is that we can release QtWebEngine
> more often than Qt, if we want to, and that we can have a version number
> that reflects our maturity and not the maturity of Qt as a whole.

My 2 cents from the packaging/installer side: Any artifact that is heavily bound to a specific Qt build / release, but isn't part of the Qt package itself, is making things complicated. 

One example: We used to have the Qt packages split up into 'essentials' and 'addons' ... only that Qt Assistant, as part of 'essentials', did depend on the 'addon' QtWebKit, and didn't start if QtWebKit was missing. In practice, we got almost no complains about this, which probably means that nobody bothered to install essentials without addons, in the first place :) As a result we're nowadays shipping one Qt binary package, including all prebuilt essentials & addons together.

I'm not sure whether this exact problem will be an issue with QtWebEngine too, or for how long Qt Assistant will continue to use QtWebKit. But keeping interdependent packages in sync is certainly not a free ride.

That's of course only the binary installer ... I can't judge whether e.g. distributions would appreciate separate releases of QtWebEngine. But given that we're planning to hand out Qt patch level releases more often I'd like to lobby for KISS in this case. That is, if it's an integral part of Qt, shares the BC promises of Qt, ... I think it should share the version number, too.

Regards

Kai

PS: An argument for having it as a separate package in the installer might be the size of QtWebEngine. Any estimate on this? If it's too big I can see that people want to have the choice to _not_ install it ;)