[Development] QtWebEngine and Qt 6 (was: Re: Can your module be included in Qt 6?)

[Tuukka Turunen]

Hi,

The situation with Qt WebEngine open-source releases during the commercial-only LTS phase is slightly unclear still as it has a very large 3rd party item it depends on. In essence Qt WebEngine is just bindings of the Chromium HTML5 engine to Qt. Intention is to clarify this before Qt 6.0 is released and the commercial-only LTS phase begins. 

Yours,

	Tuukka

On 26.6.2020, 13.47, "Development on behalf of Florian Bruhin" <development-bounces at qt-project.org on behalf of me at the-compiler.org> wrote:

    Hey,

    On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 09:53:55AM +0000, Lars Knoll wrote:
    > As you can see, the scope of 6.0 will be reduced compared to 5.15.

    So now that it's official that QtWebEngine won't be part of Qt 6.0:

    What will that mean for security upgrades (i.e. updates of the underlying
    Chromium) for open source users of Qt as soon as Qt 6.0 is out?

    Given that the 5.15 LTS is restricted to commercial users[1], does that mean
    that open source projects will be stuck on Qt 5.15.4 (or .3 or .5 or whatever)
    until Qt 6.1 is released in May/June 2021 or so?

    If that's the case, I'm not sure that'll help Qt's reputation when it comes to
    its handling of security issues... Don't get me wrong, I can understand where
    TQtC is coming from with the commercial-only LTS decision - but if there are no
    QtWebEngine security fixes for open source users at all for what's probably
    more than half a year (the time between the last 5.15.x before 6.0; and 6.1),
    that seems like a huge problem, no?

    I'm all for "We are making this change to encourage open-source users to
    quickly adopt new versions" (from that blog post), but what if that's not
    possible because those new versions don't exist at the point the old versions
    get abandoned? Wouldn't it make a lot of sense to make the 5.15 LTS
    commercial-only only at the point Qt 6.1 is released, at least for all modules
    not part of Qt 6.0?

    [1] https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020

    Florian

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