[Development] Changes to Qt offering

[Tuukka Turunen]

Hi Antonio,

Like the announcement says: "Starting with Qt 5.15, long term support (LTS) will only be available to commercial customers." There is no plan currently to change ongoing Qt 5.9 LTS or Qt 5.12 LTS support period. 

Qt 5.12 is currently in Strict phase, next step moving to Very strict phase according to: https://code.qt.io/cgit/meta/quips.git/tree/quip-0005.rst 

During the Strict phase Qt 5.12 will receive some of the most important bug fixes, but not all. We do not want to cause instability and every change is prone to do that.

During the Very strict phase (last year) Qt 5.12 is to receive security fixes only - and possibly some bug fix, although at that point there really should no more be such bugs that should be fixed.

Note that the release cadence will be much slower towards the end of the LTS life-cycle - just like with Qt 5.9 LTS. 

Yours,

	Tuukka

On 29.1.2020, 13.05, "Development on behalf of Antonio Larrosa" <development-bounces at qt-project.org on behalf of ALarrosa at suse.com> wrote:

    On 27/1/20 15:34, Lars Knoll wrote:
    > One is a change in policy regarding the LTS releases, where the LTS part of a release is in the future going to be restricted to commercial customers. All bug fixes will (as agreed on the Qt Contributor Summit) go into dev first. Backporting bug fixes is something that the Qt Company will take care of for these LTS branches. We’ve seen over the past that LTS support is something mainly required by large companies, and should hopefully help us get some more commercial support for developing Qt further.
    > 
    
    With everyone talking about how long will fixes for Qt 5.15 be provided to open
    source developers (and the common consensus being they'll be available only
    around 6 months until ~Jan 2021) I have a question about 5.12.
    
    When Qt 5.12 was released the promise back then was it will be maintained until
    5/12/2021 . Is that still true? or will 5.12 not get public maintenance once Qt
    6.0 is released just as 5.15?
    
    I find it hard to believe The Qt Company will break already made "contracts"
    with the community about LTS life-cycles of released products, but in that
    scenario we have a bit of a paradox with 5.12 LTS being maintained for longer
    than 5.15 LTS so it would be nice to get some clarification on that.
    
    Also, I have a question in order to clarify the announcement. Which of the next
    sentences is true?
    
    1) Once Qt 6.0 is released, there won't be Qt 5.15.x public releases anymore and
    Qt developers from The Qt Company will work in a closed branch/git repository
    which will only get released to commercial customers.
    
    2) Once Qt 6.0 is released, there won't be Qt 5.15.x public releases anymore but
    backported fixes will be accessible at the 5.15 branch of the git repository as
    usual.
    
    I guess the answer is 1), but the blog announcement always talks about releases,
    which is left to interpretation. So I hope The Qt Company reconsiders and takes
    at least the 2) option approach as a way to make the announcement a bit less bad.
    
    --
    Antonio Larrosa
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