[Development] qsizetype

[Ilya Fedin]

On Wed, 07 Sep 2022 08:45:45 +0200
Kevin Kofler via Development <development at qt-project.org> wrote:

> It scares me that a Qt 7 is already being planned or discussed at
> all, considering that your major consumers such as KDE Plasma are not
> even ported to Qt 6 yet! (Note that I am talking about *consumers*
> here, not only about (paying) customers. The former includes FOSS
> projects such as KDE.)

I believe the fact KDE is not ported to Qt 6 yet is more question of
bureaucracy coordination of a lot of people in different KDE projects.
That is, deciding that they want to port to Qt 6 takes time, then every
project maintainer should do the port and it seems they want to
announce Qt 6 support only with KF6, it's not like GNOME that changed
version scheme to not to associate their major version with major
version of their toolkit.

Ports themselves seem to be trivial for most of KDE frameworks from
what I saw: cmake changes, some deprecation of APIs using Qt's
deprecated APIs, etc.

I.e. what takes the time seem to be mostly routine, coordination and
bureaucracy rather than solving big breaking changes while porting.

> Those major/BIC releases need to happen a lot less frequently, or
> ideally, stop entirely. At least if you want your consumers to keep
> up (and you clearly do or you would not have restricted access to Qt
> 5.15 LTS).
> 
> You should plan for Qt 6.x releases (rather than 7.x) for at least 10
> more years, if not indefinitely.

A framework without major updates will stagnate. Qt 6 finally added RHI
and there's still a lot of modern APIs in systems, Qt doesn't provide
cross-platform abstractions for.

I don't understand how you can ask a piece of software to not to have
major updates **indefinitely**...