[Development] Changes planned for the online installer

[Tuukka Turunen]

Hi,

Online installer has over time become quite crowded with different releases and many have noticed that it is getting quite slow at times. Having all this default content is also problematic for those who mirror Qt as it would take a significant amount of disk space to have a complete mirror.

From user viewpoint it could be seen handy that all these different releases are available via the online installer, but there are caveats. One major item is security. We always recommend to take the latest supported patch release, but have offered also all the old ones. It should be more clear than today to users what release to take. Unsupported releases contain multiple known vulnerabilities and should not be used.

With an upcoming version of the online installer, we are planning to make the following changes:

  *   Separate the pre-releases to its own ‘preview’ category, only visible when enabled
  *   Remove all unsupported Qt releases from the online installer
  *   Move all but the latest patch releases of supported Qt releases into ‘archive’ category

This allows for greatly improved user experience of the online installer, focuses users to take the latest release with all security updates and reduces the space needed from the mirrors.

Commercial online installer uses Amazon CDN and for the commercial users we are planning to offer some the older, unsupported releases. There is also extended support available for those commercial license holders who are using an otherwise unsupported release of Qt.

Old Qt releases continue to be available for everyone in the download.qt.io<http://download.qt.io> historical archive, but in general they should be considered as a historical reference, not used in active projects.

Feedback and thoughts welcome. The topic could also be taken to the agenda of next week’s release team meeting?

Yours,

                Tuukka





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