[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Bogdan Vatra]

În ziua de marți, 28 ianuarie 2020, la 15:26:34 EET, Lisandro Damián Nicanor 
Pérez Meyer a scris:
> 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.

  What happens when Qt 6 will be out and TQC closes 5.15 branch and you'll 
have to maintain Qt 5 for a couple of years without any bug fixes from 
upstream? As I pointed in my previous mails, the major risk here is that there 
will be a Qt 5.15 fork after the 5.15 branch is closed ... and nobody wins 
from such a scenario.

Cheers,
BogDan.