[Development] Decrease amount of qt releases in online installer

[Thiago Macieira]

On Wednesday, 21 February 2024 13:13:33 PST Tuukka Turunen via Development 
wrote:
> 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.

There are a couple of reasons why one may want to install a non-latest 
release. Usually, that's because they have a project that has stopped updating 
Qt at some point in the past (hopefully not for long) and now they need to 
install Qt for a new environment (new developer, reinstalled machine, 
whatever).

I'd argue in this case that their CI should have the crystallised version, but 
developers should be able to install later versions. The CI must have an 
archived installation that they can recreate 5 years from today, independent 
of whether qt.io still offers the binary or not (knock on wood, but the website  
may have disappeared!). But developers will probably be satisfied if they can 
get the latest patch of a given minor series. And even then I'd say only for 
the latest couple minor series; there's no reason why we still need to offer 
6.1.x today.

The only other case that comes to mind for needing access to other-than-last 
patch or very old things is to bisect a bug either in Qt or in their software, 
to find out when the problem started occurring. Unfortunately, the number of 
developers who will spend the time for this is very small, and I'm also 
skeptical that there are any that would do this and don't build from source 
anyway.

In any case, the sources won't be removed. One can always rebuild the binaries 
if needed.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Cloud Software Architect - Intel DCAI Cloud Engineering
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