[Development] Making Binary Incompatible Changes after Qt 6.0

[Volker Hilsheimer]

> On 8 Dec 2020, at 22:32, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer <perezmeyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Sorry, hit enter too fast
> 
> On Tue, 8 Dec 2020 at 18:31, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer
> <perezmeyer at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi!
>> 
>> On Tue, 8 Dec 2020 at 17:47, Benjamin TERRIER <b.terrier at gmail.com> wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> Aren't LTS a commercial only thing now?
>>> So doing a BC after an LTS isn't much different than doing it after any other version for distro maintainers and the open source world in general.
>> 
>> With my Debian maintainer hat on: oh *yes*, it  would be painful.
> 
> Every ~4 years would kind of make sense. As long as SONAME is bumped.

Well, if we continue to allow ourselves to break BC only every >= 4 years, then we might just as well stick to the current ways and bump the major version, including the source incompatible changes that come with the kind of rearchitecture and cleanup work that is somewhat inevitable with that time span.

For the record: the time between Qt 3 and Qt 4 was ~4 years. Before Qt 3 it was less. Qt 4 to 5 and 5 to 6 clocked in at 7 and 8 years, respectively.

Volker