[Development] Commercial-only LTS phase starts: Closing the 5.15 branch(es) on 5th January

[Vlad Stelmahovsky]

you guys getting "famous":
https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commercial_only/

On Wed, Jan 6, 2021 at 12:15 PM Volker Hilsheimer <volker.hilsheimer at qt.io>
wrote:

> > On 5 Jan 2021, at 21:18, Max Paperno <max-l at wdg.us> wrote:
> >
> > On 1/5/2021 1:02 PM, Adam Light wrote:
> >> On Tue, Jan 5, 2021 at 7:56 AM Volker Hilsheimer <
> volker.hilsheimer at qt.io <mailto:volker.hilsheimer at qt.io>> wrote:
> >>    Apart from that: is Qt 5.15.2 really so broken that people can’t use
> >>    it without getting more patches?
> >> I can't speak to 5.15 as we decided not to upgrade since it's not a
> real LTS release (we do not believe we are eligible to purchase a
> commercial license), but the minor fixes that come later in LTS releases
> (5.9 and 5.12) have often fixed problems our users have reported in our
> application, particularly on macOS. Due to behavior changes in different Qt
> minor versions (again, primarily on macOS), we typically change the Qt
> minor version only when we release a new major version of our application
> (~every 2-3 years).
> >> LTS releases have been critical in our successful use of Qt, and I am
> not sure what will happen moving forward.
> >> Adam
> >
> > Hear, hear.  Stuck on 5.12 here.
> >
> > Working on OS projects, commercial is not even an option, and resources
> (e.g. for testing/fixing on every new Qt release) are very limited (read:
> one person often does everything). E.g. testing one app on 5.14.1 yielded 3
> breaking Qt issues which had to be fixed upstream, and mostly didn't make
> it into .2 either. LTS (after like a .3 or so update) is the only way to go
> IMHO, the others are for testing/playing.
> >
> > I'm so sick of "scheduled releases come hell or high water" in the
> programming world (in general, not just Qt).  The quality is (usually)
> crap.  Once upon a time this release quality was called
> Alpha/Beta/Preview/NFP (not for production).  Qt6 has literally been called
> as being "primarily" for testing/feedback.  That's a new major release
> now?  /further rant aborted
> >
> > Sorry, I'm only passionate about it because I love what Qt does and I
> love when it does it well and consistently.  Everyone who's helped make it
> that way is my hero, thank you!
> >
> > -Max
>
>
> Hi Max and Adam,
>
>
> What can do better to avoid such regressions from making it into a
> release, or preferably into the code, in the first place? Nobody, not even
> the Qt Company management :P *wants* to release crappy quality on time.
>
> What we know about those bugs is that they passed all code reviews, and
> didn’t get caught by any of the thousands of tests we run for every change
> on half a dozen platforms. And we know that the only way they were
> discovered is real users testing real applications against the released
> version of Qt.
>
> So, what we have is clearly not good enough, but if the last 15 years of
> writing unit tests etc hasn’t gotten us to a better place, then maybe “more
> of the same” can’t be the only strategy.
>
> Is your experience that we release stuff “come hell or high water" in
> spite of severe bugs being reported during beta testing? We do spend a lot
> of time triaging incoming bug reports, and a severe enough bug can always
> block a release.
>
> Or do we not discover the issues until the .0 release because few people
> test the pre-releases? That seems to be supported by the data we have about
> downloads and general activity in response to pre-releases.
>
>
> Volker
>
>
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-- 
Best regards,
Vlad
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