[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Thiago Macieira]

On segunda-feira, 27 de janeiro de 2020 14:48:17 PST 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.

That is debatable since most Linux distributions do not align with the Qt 
LTSes. Kevin's question of 5.15 support while 6.0 is coming is valid, but for 
all other LTSes, open source Linux distros seem to choose whichever version 
was latest at the time they reached feature-freeze.

Current versions in:
* Debian stable: 5.11.3
* Debian oldstable: 5.7.1
* Fedora 31: 5.12.5
* Fedora 30: 5.12.1
* Fedora 29: 5.11.1
* Fedora 28: 5.10.1
* CentOS 8.1: 5.11.1
* openSUSE 15: 5.9.4 (15.1 now has 5.9.7)
* openSUSE 42.3: 5.6.2
* openSUSE 42.2: 5.6.1
* (K)Ubuntu 19.10: 5.12.4
* Ubuntu 18.10: 5.11.1
* Ubuntu 18.04 LTS: 5.9.5
* Ubuntu 16.04 LTS: 5.5.1
* KDE Neon: 5.13.2
* Manjaro 18.1.0: 5.13.0

There are a couple of alignments with Qt LTS above but they could be 
coincidences. openSUSE 15 was released around 6 months after the 5.10.0 
release (and less than 3 after 5.10.1, which is when they seem to make 
upgrades) and Ubuntu 18.04 was a month earlier than openSUSE. I thought Fedora 
31 was trying to align, but then I went to search for the current version and 
F32-in-development has already upgraded out of the LTS to 5.13.2.

Ubuntu snapshot for 20.04 is on 5.12.6. That seems to me to be the only 
legitimate, intentional alignment on a Qt LTS. If that's confirmed, it would 
be the first, after 4 years of having LTS releases.

So it's completely understandable to have concluded that the LTS releases 
weren't useful to Linux distributions.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel System Software Products