[Development] Decrease amount of qt releases in online installer

[Tuukka Turunen]

Hi,

This is a good change. It has been a long time since we previously cleaned the releases available via the online installer, so the number has been growing to be quite large.

In general we should be always guiding users towards the latest releases and to large extent users are doing that. We should also be even faster that currently transferring the unmaintained releases to the archive, which in turn likely causes more that today use of the archive (of the online installer), so removing very old ones from the online installer is beneficial.

Mirrors make their own decisions on what they mirror, but Qt repositories are large so keeping the size of the online installer repo in control means it will have better mirror coverage. When the size grows too big, we tend to lose mirrors.

Yours,

                Tuukka

From: Development <development-bounces at qt-project.org> on behalf of Jani Heikkinen via Development <development at qt-project.org>
Date: Wednesday, February 21, 2024 at 13:34
To: Giuseppe D'Angelo <giuseppe.dangelo at kdab.com>, development at qt-project.org <development at qt-project.org>
Subject: Re: [Development] Decrease amount of qt releases in online installer
> -----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

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