[Development] Updates on Qt Location

[Volker Hilsheimer]

> On 23 Jul 2022, at 13:38, Kevin Kofler via Development <development at qt-project.org> wrote:
> 
> Volker Hilsheimer wrote:
>> From what we see (in download numbers and when talking to customers
>> waiting for Qt Location), making Qt Location work with Qt 6.2 brings the
>> most value to most users, Open Source or otherwise.
> 
> Your download counts do not include Open Source users because those get Qt 
> (and Qt Location) from their GNU/Linux distribution, not directly from 
> upstream.


They certainly do not include all Open Source users, but we see a lot of downloads from Open Source users.

And as per your own speculation:


> In addition, there will necessarily be few Open Source users of Qt 6 as long 
> as most KDE software is not ready for it. (Instead, KDE maintains their own 
> branches of Qt 5 with bugfix backports to work around your hostile LTS 
> policy.) And missing modules such as Qt Location are a big part of why.



… which, mixed with the data we have from our customers, makes Qt 6.2 the right Qt 6 baseline to focus on.


> As I understand it, Qt Location is needed even by a part of Qt itself: for 
> QtWebEngine, in order to support HTML 5 geolocation. (At least the 
> qt5-qtwebengine package I comaintain has a "BuildRequires: qt5-qtlocation-
> devel".) Or has that changed?

In the dependency declaration in the current dev branch [1], qtwebengine lists qtpositioning, and not qtlocation.

[1] https://code.qt.io/cgit/qt/qtwebengine.git/tree/dependencies.yaml

So I assume that this covers the geolocation functionality that was needed from Qt Location in Qt 5. After all, we have been releasing Qt WebEngine with Qt 6 for a while now without Qt Location being available.

> So GNU/Linux distributions WILL need Qt Location to work with QtBase 6.3 and 
> 6.4, and QtWebEngine 6.3 and 6.4 to work with Qt Location (no matter what 
> version number you put on your Qt Location releases).

Once we have the 6.2-based Qt Location in good shape, I will probably not be able to keep spending a lot of my time on that module, as there is plenty to do elsewhere. I'll come back to Qt Location when Qt 6.5 is getting close.

But anyone is of course welcome to see what it takes to make it also work with 6.3 and 6.4, and to contribute patches. Updating the 6.3 and 6.4 branches so that necessary patches can be contributed will of course not be a problem. We can build that bridge once we get there.


Volker