[Development] Decrease amount of qt releases in online installer

[Jani Heikkinen]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> On Behalf Of
> Giuseppe D'Angelo via Development
> Sent: keskiviikko 21. helmikuuta 2024 13.21
> To: development at qt-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Development] Decrease amount of qt releases in online installer
> 
> Hello,
> 
> On 21/02/2024 11:42, Jani Heikkinen via Development wrote:
> > Currently, more than 60 Qt releases can be installed from the Qt open
> > source online installer (if all installation categories are selected).
> > This requires a huge amount of disk space on the mirrors and also
> > causes some performance issues with the online installer.
> 
> What kind of performance issues are we talking about?

It takes quite a time to show all releases when you select  'archive'  category. With latest online installer this is already much better than earlier but it still takes some time and it's a bit annoying... 

> 
> > That's why I suggest
> > removing the older ones from the online installer; these releases can
> > still be found in the archive as source packages and offline installers.
> >
> > But what are the ones that can be removed? I suggest removing all Qt 5
> > except Qt 5.15.x. And maybe we could also remove the oldest Qt6s, e.g.
> > all Qt 6.0.x, 6.1.x?
> >
> > Any objections or other opinions?
> >
> 
> Do you have data on how what's the share of downloads per Qt version / OS?
> Maybe those can be mirrored less aggressively?

I don't have that kind of data in my hands now but it isn't that easy to choose mirroring strategy based on the release; releases aren't in one folder in online installer and so on it would be quite hard for mirrors to define which repos (==folders) should not be mirrored.

- Jani