[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Giuseppe D'Angelo]

Il 27/01/20 23:15, Cristián Maureira-Fredes ha scritto:
> Hello David,
> 
> On 1/27/20 11:00 PM, David Edmundson wrote:
>>> All security fixes are made available to everyone, for all Qt versions that
>>> they affect, provided it's still a supported Qt version (or it was easy to
>>> make the fix).
>>>
>> If we could have that explicitly in writing from TQC, that would mean a lot.
> 
> The blog post states:
> 
> "We are changing our process in R&D to push all bug fixes to the main
> development branch first, and then backport selected bug fixes back into
> stable release branches. This process ensures that the latest version of
> Qt will always contain all bug fixes. This process change was discussed
> during the last Qt Contributor Summit – we communicate the exact process
> details when Qt 5.15 will be released. Otherwise, development processes
> and the governance model will not change."
> 
> This means that you still have access to all the fixes for 5.15
> that happen after 5.15.2-3, since they will be on the dev branch.

I've already commented on this and got no replies

> https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2020-January/038344.html

First and foremost, this is not true in general: dev is Qt 6. A patch 
that doesn't apply to Qt 6 will therefore not land on dev at all. A 
patch to Qt 6 that also involves Qt 5 will need to be cherry picked, and 
that may cause extra burden (conflicts), but Lars said:

> Backporting bug fixes is something that the Qt Company will take care of for these LTS branches.

=> What does the "these" refer to here? Any LTS branch or private 
(commercial only) LTS branches?

Conversely, someone still using Qt 5 may produce a patch for a bugfix 
for 5.15. If that bug also affects Qt 6, such a patch shall be rejected 
as per policy. If the producer of the fix doesn't care about Qt 6 (for 
the time being) and doesn't want to invest the time to get the fix there 
first, then Qt 5 shall remain without the fix, again as per policy.

(Yes, unfortunately the situation is unfortunate given 5.15 is LTS _and_ 
the next one is Qt 6, a major break forward, so there's extra trouble here.)

Let me ask again: is the 5.15 branch remaining open source and open for 
submissions on gerrit, and simply the _releases_ made out of it will be 
commercial-only releases (not open source)? If yes, is everyone simply 
going to cherry pick in such public branch, pretty much just like today, 
and anyone can clone and build it from git as open source? If not, what 
happens to the public 5.15 branch after 5.15 switches to commercial only?


> If there is a bug on 5.15 and not on 6.0,
> a fix will be pushed to the dev branch, then cherry pick to the
> commercial LTS version, but the patch will still be there, so you
> can just added to your local Qt version.

dev == Qt 6; the fix will have to be pushed on the 5.15 branch, assuming 
(see the question above and in the other mails I've sent) it stays open.

My 2 c,
-- 
Giuseppe D'Angelo | giuseppe.dangelo at kdab.com | Senior Software Engineer
KDAB (France) S.A.S., a KDAB Group company
Tel. France +33 (0)4 90 84 08 53, http://www.kdab.com
KDAB - The Qt, C++ and OpenGL Experts

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