[Development] Supported compilers for Qt 6

[Thiago Macieira]

On Monday, 12 August 2019 10:57:34 PDT Giuseppe D'Angelo via Development 
wrote:
> Il 12/08/19 17:11, Thiago Macieira ha scritto:
> > I think we should aim for something that is modern, but not bleeding edge
> > today. For a release in late 2020, we should expect that people may want
> > to
> > use with close-to-2-year-old Linux distros. I would prefer they didn't,
> > but I think it's reasonable for us to assume they did.
> > 
> > We should also specifically look into what the very long term support
> > Linux
> > distributions and Android SDKs use.
> > 
> >   - Debian 10 (July 2019): GCC 8.3.0
> >   - RHEL 8 (May 2019): GCC 8.2.1
> >   - SLES 15 (June 2018): GCC 7.3.1
> 
> Ubuntu 18.04 has GCC 7.3 by default, and 8.2 optional. The question is
> which compiler is going to be the default by Ubuntu 20.04 (the next LTS)
> and SLES 16?

My guess is Ubuntu 20.04 will have GCC 9, given that 10 releases in April 
2020, which is too late for an update, and the current snapshot already has 
GCC 9.

SLES16 is not relevant, unless SUSE changes their release frequency. The 
previous two releases were 5 years apart. SLES15 SP2 is a different story, 
though SP1 has not changed the GCC version (see [1]), despite GCC 8 being over 
a year old at the time of SP1 release.

We won't support those long-term releases for too long after 6.0, but I think 
they are a good ballpark for our release. Is there any really cool or 
important feature for us to require GCC 8, instead of 7? Like the enforced 
copy elision we'll need to deprecate QMutexLocker.

[1] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/openSUSE:Backports:SLE-15-SP1

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel System Software Products