[Development] [RFCs] Migrate from GCC MinGW to LLVM MinGW

[Kai Köhne]

> From: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> on behalf of Yang Fan <missdeer at gmail.com>
> Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2023 3:55 AM
> To: Cristian Adam
> Cc: development at qt-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Development] [RFCs] Migrate from GCC MinGW to LLVM MinGW
> 
> I wanted to point out that MSYS2 offers precompiled packages of Qt6 in 
> four different environments: CLANGARM64, MINGW64, CLANG64, and
> UCRT64. In my opinion, simply switching among Qt's official precompiled
> packages and toolchains doesn't seem to carry significant benefits.

Well, it's about making a sane default for the users of the online installer. I appreciate the choices MSYS2 offers you, but supporting the 4 different variants in the Qt online installer would put even more stress on our CI. There's also a danger in offering too many choices, especially to users new to Windows ("curse of choice"). 

> Instead, learning how MSYS2 provides precompiled packages for multiple 
> toolchains seems to be a more fruitful approach. Alternatively, just 
> providing support such as mkspecs for users to compile on their own 
> could also be sufficient.

Such build recipes are notoriously hard to make bullet-proof, especially on Windows - and arguably one of the reasons why MSYS2 exists. So again, I'd rather select one toolchain we can support that works for most of our users. For the users that need a different choice, there's luckily MSYS2 :)

My 2 cents,

Kai