[Development] Release plan moving forward

[Robin Burchell]

Hi,

Responding to just the LTS news: I think that this is tentatively good
news. I worry, though, on a releasing front whether it is realistic to
consider supporting now two LTS branches, plus potentially 2-3 normal
branches at the same time, especially since we don't yet have firm proof
that we are able to even maintain a constant release cadence with the
branches we have now.

Can we get into a position where we can make a patch release every
second month, say, so that security issues and high priority fixes don't
have to wait half a year or more? The part of this that worries me is
that I see 89 patches on just qtdeclarative/5.6 that aren't yet
released, some of the highlights of the top of the commit log being:

* Fix heap buffer overflow
* Fixed assertion failure
* Fix for dangling pointers (x 2)
* Fix crash when ...

... and this was without looking for more than a minute or two.

Right now, I honestly find it a bit difficult to recommend any given
version -- right now, 5.6 is too old to offer a number of the things I
would like to have, lags behind in performance, and has a number of
unreleased fixes, but both 5.7 and 5.8 had their own share of problems
in my opinion, and 5.9 isn't yet released.

Just my (personal) $0.02...

-- 
  Robin Burchell
  robin at crimson.no

On Tue, May 9, 2017, at 03:35 PM, Lars Knoll wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> I believe I have some good news to share with regards to our releases
> moving forward. As you all know, we had quite some trouble getting patch
> level releases out over the last year, going so far that we ended up not
> doing patch level releases for 5.8.
> 
> Fortunately, things are starting to look a lot better now. You might
> already have noticed the rolling beta releases for 5.9, where we have
> pushed updated betas out every 1-2 weeks. This shows that things are now
> going a lot smoother and we are in a much better shape to create releases
> in the future.
> 
> Additionally, things have improved on the CI and releasing side. It's
> nowadays a lot easier to get a qt5.git update through and create new
> packages from a successful qt5.git integration. In summer, the CI system
> will get a major HW upgrade giving it a much larger capacity, avoiding
> capacity conflicts between CI, packaging and release testing.Together
> with improvements to the  Release Test Automation (RTA) which
> automatically tests our packages we're actually getting into a good
> position to do patch level releases with relatively little manual labor
> from 5.9 and onwards. This means that we should now be in a position to
> do much more frequent patch level releases from 5.9 onwards.
> 
> Another thing that has happened is that The Qt Company has been seeing
> lots of requests for a new LTS release, as Qt 5.6 is starting to feel
> relatively old. I have also heard this request from a few places in the
> wider Qt community. Because of the improvements to CI/packaging and
> releasing, I believe we are now in a good position to make that happen.
> 
> So we are now planning to make Qt 5.9 a LTS release. It's been 3 minor
> releases since 5.6 and a lot of good things have happened in Qt, so this
> should be very good news to those of our users that don't always want to
> be on the bleeding edge but are looking for a stable version that's
> supported for a long time.
> 
> So once 5.9 is out, we are planning for rather frequent patch level
> releases for that branch for the first 6-9 months. After that, we'll move
> 5.9 into strict mode where we will also release a little less often, and
> then have it in a very strict mode for the last year. See the draft QUIP
> at https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/178906/45//ALL,unified for more
> details on LTS branches.
> 
> Of course, we will also continue to support 5.6 for the promised three
> years. We are planning to release 5.6.3 in Summer, after which 5.6 will
> move into the 'very strict' mode as defined in the branch policy QUIP.
> 
> After 5.9, we'll be aiming at 5.10 in late autumn, 5.11 next spring. I
> believe that we will be doing one more final LTS release on the Qt 5
> series, but most of the work after 5.11 will probably start to be aimed
> on working towards Qt 6.
> 
> Now let's not go into discussions what Qt 6 exactly will be in this
> thread. I believe a lot of work towards defining what we're aiming at
> with Qt 6 will be for the Contributor Summit in October. But the outline
> above should give you good overview over the releases planned for the
> next 18 months.
> 
> Cheers,
> Lars
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