[Development] Preparing for Qt 6.8 feature freeze: whatsnew68, QT_TECH_PREVIEW_API

[Volker Hilsheimer]

Hi all,

It’s still a few weeks to go until we have Qt 6.8 feature freeze, and a quick grep for `\since 6.8` tells me that a bunch of goodness has already landed.

However, the whatsnew68.qdoc document is still a bit empty. I’ve now pushed a change that adds missing section etc to https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtdoc/+/560438

As with the last releases, please edit that change, ideally directly in the gerrit UI rather than with a local fetch/edit/push roundtrip*, to add your things. This avoiding conflicts when many of us are adding content to the same file.


I expect that we will move several APIs out of technology preview that were introduced as technology previews in Qt 6.6 or 6.7. To make the header review for such changes clearer (i.e. make it visible to us that an API that was in tech preview is now stable, but also that a new API is under tech preview), it might help to now retroactively add the QT_TECH_PREVIEW_API attribute to APIs in Qt 6.7 that are moving out of tech preview. This way we see that change when comparing the 6.7 branch to 6.8.

The QT_TECH_PREVIEW_API attribute was added by Peppe in https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/541498 with explanation on how to use it.
In https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtbase/+/559747 I‘ve retrofitted the attribute to a few JNI APIs that were added for Qt 6.7 to public headers, but are not documented yet. Once I’m done with adding the documentation, the attribute can be removed and the API moves out of tech preview, which then the diff between 6.7 and 6.8 should show, helping header reviewers.

And if you want to start with reviewing changes to our public API: https://codereview.qt-project.org/q/hashtag:%22needs+api-review_6.8%22+status:merged is a list of changes that our new machine overlords have analysed (sometimes wrongly) to have API impact.

Volker

* unless you use gpush from qtrepotools, which avoids that you overwrite someone else’s patch set

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/attachments/20240509/f322eaf0/attachment.htm>