[Development] Decrease amount of qt releases in online installer

[Ville Voutilainen]

On Wed, 21 Feb 2024 at 14:33, Jani Heikkinen via Development
<development at qt-project.org> wrote:
> > 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...

While I'm vaguely aware of various challenges in trying to apply
filterings and mappings to the available-package metadata
that the installation system has, I would highly recommend exploring
some technical alternatives to solve that problem.
I would think we could, even with the limitations of the current
system, change that operation so that it shows a first
fistful of archived releases, and separately allows showing all of
them. Furthermore, the slowness of that operation
suggests that that view of the installer populates much more model
data than it actually really needs for displaying
the available releases.

I have no particular problem removing e.g 6.0, 6.1, and 6.2. Good
riddance. 5.12 is a completely different case, though.
And such removals would really be temporary measures, over time we are
just going to end up with the same problem.

So yeah, overall, I'd like us to investigate the possibilities of
providing filtered views that can be multi-step-expanded
to show more of the available options, rather than just outright
removing the older releases as a choice.