[Development] Focusing bug fixes to 5.9 branch and patch releases during H1/17

[Tuukka Turunen]

Hi Kevin,

As has been said many times, features of Qt 5.9 have already been developed and frozen, development of Qt 5.10 features is ongoing. Postponing or reopening Qt 5.9 would mean we work very inefficiently and that should be avoided. There are also many other reasons, as I have explained in multiple mails to the mailing lists. No-one likes skipping patch level releases, but this is what now needs to be done. Qt 5.7.1 has been released in December and Qt 5.8.0 in January – so we do have very recent two releases you and others to use. 

What comes to Open Governance, we of course can always improve communications. What was done is that I informed decision that The Qt Company had done not to participate in making Qt 5.8.1 release and based on that the Release team of the Qt Project decided to close Qt 5.8 branch. Some people volunteered to help in making Qt 5.8.1, which is great but... the current infrastructure does not enable making a new patch release without a significant effort from The Qt Company personnel as well as a major load in the systems. Therefore, I have proposed that we all rather focus on getting Qt 5.9.0 and 5.9.1 out faster and improve the stability of the infrastructure (including fixing the flaky test cases).

We have many users still in Qt 5.6 LTS, which is fine, but eventually we need to provide new releases that receive more than one patch level release. Hopefully we can do this for Qt 5.9 with the new CI system infrastructure coming around June timeframe as well as the improve stability of the system achieved via fixing the flaky cases. 

Yours,

		Tuukka

On 04/03/2017, 0.56, "Development on behalf of Kevin Kofler" <development-bounces+tuukka.turunen=qt.io at qt-project.org on behalf of kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:

    Mathias Hasselmann wrote:
    > Guys, by not delivering bugfix releases for arbitrary reasons we are
    > risking to kill Qt's credibility as reliable toolkit. Our users trust in
    > getting bugfix releases.
    
    I agree with this. I really don't see why you don't postpone 5.9 instead. Qt 
    used to release on a 9 to 12 month basis, now it is down to 6 months. And 
    for 5.9, not even that, because somehow there is an unrealistic expectation 
    that 5.9 magically makes up for the delays in releasing 5.8. The release 
    schedule for 5.9 should be based on the actual 5.8 release date, not the 
    planned 5.8 release date. The amount of churn is such that some distros are 
    still working on packaging 5.8 while you are already about to branch 5.9.
    
    I also agree with Marc Mutz (and no, you have not misread ;-) ) that the way 
    the decision is being dictated onto the community runs counter to the "Open 
    Governance" promises.
    
            Kevin Kofler
    
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