[Development] Proposal: Deprecate QVector in Qt 6

[Ville Voutilainen]

On Fri, 24 Apr 2020 at 13:38, Edward Welbourne <edward.welbourne at qt.io> wrote:
>
> On 4/23/20 11:10 PM, Vitaly Fanaskov wrote:
> >> Moving to one year release approach doesn't equal to make Qt less stable.
>
> Ville:
> > Of course it does, if we now allow API breaks every year.
>
> Not necessarily: if we *allow* API breaks every year *but* are
> restrained in our use of them - so that, in fact, over a given ten year
> period, we only make as many API breaks; we just spread them out over
> time more evenly - then we'd be no less stable; and it'd be easier for
> client code maintainers to keep up with our major version updates,
> because they'd be smaller.

That is still less stable. The more frequent the API breaks are, the
less stable the API
is. The size of the API break matters as well, but that's easier to
control; I make the decision
whether to jump now or later, and the size of the break to a large
extent affects what the schedule
of the jump is, not that much whether to take a jump (unless it's so
large as to be over the breaking
point, of course). If I'd need to consider such a jump every year, I'd switch to
something else, including changing the programming language if need
be. Annual API
breaks are untenable for any product that has a limited budget.