[Development] Deprecating modules with 5.5

[Gunnar Roth]

> Am 08.02.2015 um 21:25 schrieb Olivier Goffart <olivier at woboq.com>:
> 
> On Sunday 08 February 2015 19:15:18 Giuseppe D'Angelo wrote:
>> Il 08/02/2015 17:58, Thiago Macieira ha scritto:
>>> So we come back to this question again and again: if you can't upgrade the
>>> OS and upgrade the compiler, why do you want to upgrade Qt?
>> 
>> Because people want to use the latest features / bugfixes for developing
>> their product, and yet they need to target such platforms...
> 
> If Qt 5.5 is LTS, some bugs fixes could be backported.
> As for the new feature, if they can cope with an old system and compiler, they 
> can also cope with old Qt. Even if that implies re-inventing a few wheels.
> 
> So the question is:
> If we were to drop MSVC2008, about how many companies or developers do you 
> think will choose not to use Qt because of that instead of using it?
> 
> Is there perhaps a lot of paying customer using it who would stop paying 
> licenses?
> 
> When is the end of life of Windows CE?

Hi all,

According to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/product-lifecycles.aspx
MS does support WEC 7 until April 13, 2021, which is more than 6 six years.
But dropping wec 7 support would mean dropping complete ce support as the successor wec2013 is not supported by qt and qt 5.x needs quite some patches to build ( and building things like quick controls need some hacky patches, as it depends on accessibility.)

Wec2013  is using a prerelease forked version of 17.00 Compiler (as used in vs 2012)  compile OS and applications.
The support runs till October 10, 2023.
MS is actually fixing bugs in this compiler (which is delivered with wec 2013)  and has done so on our request ( i remember some optimisation internal compiler error when building qtwebkit from qt 4.8.5)
 
We are using qt 4.8.x on ce 6 and wec 2013 and we use qt 5.4 on wec2013. We skipped wec 7 so being able to use newer c++ compiler features  but in hindsight it was a pain, so i understand that many people stick with wec 7.


Regards,
Gunnar