[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Kevin Kofler]

Alexander Akulich wrote:
> I would expect a significant negative effect on the quality of Qt
> shipped in Linux distributions and thus negative effect on the
> Qt-based applications and Qt reputation.
> 
> A maintainer can assume a bit more backporting, but let's have some
> retrospective on the current LTS:
> Compared to Qt 5.12.2, the new Qt 5.12.3 provides almost 200 bug fixes
> [1]. Compared to Qt 5.12.3, the new Qt 5.12.4 provides around 250 bug
> fixes [2]. This fifth patch release to Qt 5.12 LTS contains almost 280 bug
> fixes [3]. This sixth patch release for Qt 5.12 LTS series contains more
> than 50 bug fixes [4].
> 
> The number of commits is much more than the number of closed bug reports.
> If the last open Qt 5 minor version will have three releases (5.15.0,
> 5.15.1, 5.15.2) then it is sensible to assume that the commercial Qt
> branch will have at least 1000 commits on top of the public one. It is
> barely possible for a single maintainer or a single community-driven
> distribution to backport that many commits.

+1, and this will be especially a major issue for 5.15 where we distributors 
cannot just upgrade to 5.16 instead because there will be no Qt 5.16. We 
cannot just replace Qt 5 with Qt 6, but will have to ship both for a 
significant amount of time.

        Kevin Kofler