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

[Thiago Macieira]

On segunda-feira, 29 de janeiro de 2018 21:57:38 PST Tuukka Turunen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This is not an either-or thing. Of course both having new feature releases
> and stable LTS are important. I am not claiming otherwise. My point is that
> there are more users for the LTS versions, thus I used the expression.

And that's exactly what Kevin objected: you don't present any data to say that 
there are more for LTS compared to others. All we know is that there are users 
for both and we also know that there are some users who cannot upgrade because 
we dropped platforms in both 5.10 an 5.11.

> I still would like to emphasize the point I made in my e-mail: this is to me
> specifically about what do we do to Qt 5.10 branch after release of Qt
> 5.10.1. Not about stopping patch releases altogether for other than LTS. 

My opinion is: we continue it until at least 5.11.0.

I understand that there are a lot of branches, but most of them have little to 
no activity:

qtbase $ git rev-list --count --since=6.months.ago origin/5.6
21
qtbase $ git rev-list --count --since=3.months.ago origin/5.6
7
qtdeclarative $ git rev-list --count --since=6.months.ago origin/5.6
8
qtdeclarative $ git rev-list --count --since=3.months.ago origin/5.6
1

All of Qt 5.6 has 44 commits total for the last 6 months, 8 in the last three. 
That also means only two repositories in 5.6 changed in the last three months: 
qtbase and qtdeclarative. The time between the last and the second-to-last 
commits in qtbase was over a month.

So at this point 5.6 basically doesn't count. So we effectively have open 5.9, 
5.10, 5.11 and dev, which is the same quantity as just after the 5.8 branching 
(5.6, 5.7, 5.8 and dev). And that's exactly what led to the worst release of 
all: 5.8.0. Let's not repeat that mistake.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center