[Development] Changes planned for the online installer

[Fabrice Mousset | GEOCEPT GmbH]

Hi,

It is great to hear there will be done some update on Maintenance Tool 😊
I don’t know about internal architecture of the software, but it would be great if Maintenance Tool could handle locally a little “cache” to avoid always (re)downloading from server all information about Qt releases.
Each time Maintenance Tool is launched, it downloads almost the same stuff (I think) for Qt Servers. It would be much faster to store this information locally in little “database” (XML or SQLite for example) with a MD5SUM as Checksum. This would speed up the boot process when nothing new on server between 2 starts and, I think, this will also consume less server resources.

My two cents.

Fabrice

Von: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> Im Auftrag von Tuukka Turunen
Gesendet: Dienstag, 19. März 2019 13:33
An: development at qt-project.org; releasing at qt-project.org
Betreff: [Development] Changes planned for the online installer


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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