[Development] Windows 7 support will be dropped in Qt 6

[Volker Hilsheimer]

> On 16 Jun 2020, at 02:45, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> 
> Volker Hilsheimer wrote:
>> Sounds like y’all have a wonderful new business opportunity ahead of
>> yourselves: charge your new-leaf-app-on-old-OS customers handsomely for
>> the extra effort. After all, you do have to keep your Windows 7 test rigs
>> around (and secured); perhaps even pay some extra retainers to those
>> developers on your team that know about those Windows 7 quirks. That can’t
>> be cheap in terms of net and esp opportunity cost!
> 
> You are still stuck in the commercial world there. In the Free Software 
> world, I run a shell script that builds an .exe with cross-MinGW(-w64) and 
> an installer with cross-NSIS, and only if I'm really nice, I'll run the 
> output with WINE once for a minute or two. Then I upload it. Testing is what 
> I have users for. :-p
> 
>        Kevin Kofler


Well, that explains why you seem to think that continuing support for old platforms while adding support for new ones is trivial (“it just works”), costs nothing (in terms of infrastructure, cost of delay for implementing new changes and using new capabilities), and should at the very least done for free ;)

When you have to pay people salary and have customers that pay for a supported product, then that looks a bit different, both in terms of effort and on the balance sheet.

I suppose what you describe as your QA process will about the level of QA we are going to have for Windows 7 in that Qt 6 fork then. I’d assume that you and your users/testers are going to be fine with it ;P

Cheers,
Volker