[Development] Qt branches & proposal how to continue with those

[Florian Bruhin]

On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 02:32:58PM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Simon Hausmann wrote:
> > In the light of that, I think it would be better to keep the LTS branches
> > open longer and stop doing patch releases for minor releases that are not
> > LTS.
> 
> -1 from a distro packager perspective. LTS just does not fit together with 
> fast-moving distributions, and we really need those bugfix releases for the 
> branches we ship.
> 
> Especially QtWebEngine requires those bugfix releases for security fixes, 
> and tracking LTS is not that great there because the base Chromium gets old 
> pretty quickly, and websites start complaining (e.g., Google already 
> complains about 5.9 being an outdated Chromium) or even stop working 
> altogether. The frequency of LTS releases has also so far been totally 
> insufficient to keep up with Chromium security fixes (see the huge amount of 
> time – almost a whole year! – between 5.6.2 and 5.6.3).
> 
> I would rather see LTS canceled and more effort put into the current 
> releases, if having both is a problem.

I can't agree more - while I'm not a distro packager, I'm a maintainer
of an opensource project[1] using QtWebEngine.

5.x.0 releases are often quite painful, as they're full of regressions
introduced because of new Chromium versions. I try to find report those
as soon as possible, but there are always issues ([2] for an example)
which only surface after a release.

Like Kevin said, of course security updates are also a big issue, and
only getting them all 6 months is definitely not good...

Florian

[1] https://www.qutebrowser.org/
[2] https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-65223

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