[Development] Heads-UP: Proposal for Qt 6.4 milestones & schedules

[Jani Heikkinen]

Hi All,

It is time to agree on an initial schedule for Qt 6.4. With Qt 6.3 we had some issues with getting content ready & packaged for  FF, alpha, and beta1 so we should do some adjustments to ensure smoother flow with Qt 6.4 and later releases.

We have discussed this in The Qt Company mgmt and I am proposing the following:

- Let's have an additional platform and module freeze two weeks before the official feature freeze. It means there can't be platform updates etc close to feature freeze and all new modules etc needs to be in CI 2 weeks before FF. This will mean some new platforms like macOS 13 could be postponed to .x release ( or of course added later as agreed exception, but the exception needs to be discussed and approved like all other FF exceptions). That should help us to keep dependency updates rolling and CI working close to feature freeze.

- Let's stop releasing the official alpha release and move to the beta phase immediately after branching from 'dev'. Originally we had 'alpha' as a milestone after feature freeze where it is possible to build Qt by yourself, but binaries are not yet available. This is no longer relevant as we have binary snapshots already before the feature freeze. In addition, the typical (Wikipedia) definition of alpha release is before the feature freeze, not after as we have used it.

And based on all the above my proposal for Qt 6.4 initial schedule is:

- Supported platforms and new modules in place 20th May 2022 (platform and module freeze)

- Feature freeze Fri 3rd June 2022

- Branching from dev to 6.4 (start of Beta phase) Mon 6th June 2022

- Beta 1 release 14th June 2022

- Branching from 6.4 to 6.4.0 Mon 5th September 2022

- Qt 6.4.0 final Thu 29th September 2022

br,
Jani