[Development] QtCS: Long Term Release discussion

[André Somers]

Thiago Macieira schreef op 16-6-2015 om 22:49:
> Last year's notes[1]
>
> Qt 5.5 will be the last release to support:
>       *  GCC 4.6
>       *  OS X 10.7
>       *  Windows Vista
>       *  WIndows Embedded Compact 7
>       *  QNX 6.5
>       *  Qt WebKit, Qt Script, Qt Quick 1
Ok, I understand that support for these has to go at one point, though 
I'm not feeling too happy that that happens to be in a point release. 
 From my point of view, it breaks the compatibility promise of Qt. But I 
guess that's all water under the bridge, and there is nothing that can 
be done about it. We just can't maintain it any more I understand 
(especialy WebKit).
> Therefore, we'd like to have a long-term support release that allows people
> who cannot upgrade to remain for some longer time in an official release.
Ok, that's a great goal.
> Additionally, we'd like to sync up with Ubuntu's LTS releases (next is 16.04)
> - other distros are mostly focused on servers (RHEL, SLES) or don't actively
> depend on Qt anyway.
>
> Qt 5.5 would be ideal - but we'd need to support the old Qt CI system for
> longer. So we're targetting that *Qt 5.6* will be the first LTS release.
And that I don't understand, as it is exactly 5.6 that is no longer 
supporting a list of platforms, compilers and tecnologies that people 
actually rely on, right? So it seems to me, that making 5.6 LTS is one 
release too late. For instance, if one is relying on Quick 1 like we 
are, how are we supposed to stay on a supported platform? And no, 
porting to Quick 2 isn't an option. Not as long as we can't print the 
contents of our scene like we can with our Quick 1 based reporting 
engine by simply rendering pages (sections of the scene) to a QPrinter.

It seems obvious for me that any LTS release requires keeping the 
testing infrastructure for it up, including the old platforms and 
compilers you want to support with it. But isn't keeping support for 
these the whole _point_ of the LTS release?

André