[Development] Qt 5.9

[Jani Heikkinen]

>>________________________________________
>>From: Development <development-bounces+jani.heikkinen=qt.io at qt-project.org> on behalf of Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira at intel.com>
>>Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2016 10:33 AM
>>To: development at qt-project.org
>>Subject: Re: [Development] Qt 5.9
>>
>>On terça-feira, 29 de novembro de 2016 07:32:31 PST Jake Petroules wrote:
>>> I have no idea what I'm getting when I download these packages. Why do we
>>> maintain an inconsistency for macOS versus the other two host platforms? I
>>> don't see why we can't simplify this process and have ONE platform per
>>> installer...
>>
>>I agree with Jake.
>>
>>People download the one they need first (now!). If they need something else
>>later, they can just run the maintenance tool and have it install the rest.

That is the case with online installation. With offline installer they cannot update new stuff by using maintenance tool :(  So users should prefer to online installers; with that they got biggest flexibility & smallest package size (online installer users are able to install just the stuff they need).

But there is still users who need offline installers and that's why combined installer (macOS, iOS + Android) is best for their purposes: If they don't need mobile platforms at all they can just use pure desktop one. But if they are doing mobile as well then they need to use that all-in-one offline solution.

That's why I still think we should proceed as I proposed: Keep online offering as it is but drop separate macos + android offline installer (have macOS and macOS + mobile targets for macOS offline offering). Decreasing our offline installer offering is essential; needed testing effort at the moment is really huge & it is increasing all the time because of these parallel releases. That's why we need to decrease stuff to be tested to make our live easier. 

And how to encourage users to use online installers instead of offline ones? One solution could be that we start using online ones at first & bring offline ones later. Earlier we have released beta with offline only so should we do this differently with Qt 5.9: 

Qt 5.9 alpha: src only
Qt 5.9 beta: online only
Qt 5.9 rc & final: online + offline

br,
Jani