[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer]

Hi!

On 20/01/27 06:18, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> 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.

I confirm that because one of their maintainers is also a team mate in Debian,
read below.
 
> So it's completely understandable to have concluded that the LTS releases 
> weren't useful to Linux distributions.

With my Debian maintainer hat on: exactly as Thiago said. But with a note: we
have always tried to ship a version as close to an LTS as we could (and I know
the same goes for Ubuntu, as one of my team mates prepares Ubuntu's Qt packages
from what we do in Debian). This is because it's normally easier to get the
patches from a LTS. But the point remains the same.