[Development] Proposal to raise the minimum CMake version needed to build and use Qt 6.9

[Thiago Macieira]

On Wednesday 20 November 2024 01:36:07 Pacific Standard Time Manuel Bergler 
wrote:
> > We still have the Debian stable problem, though.
> 
> Doesn't the exact same logic apply here, though? Why upgrade Qt but not
> CMake? Given that you'll only have to upgrade CMake on the dev machines,
> whereas a verison of Qt that is newer than what is available by default on
> your OS will need to also be deployed to all target machines and/or to
> your users, this doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

Not exactly, because it's a different audience. We're talking about a developer 
trying to develop Qt, not someone trying to deploy an application to a system 
that can't be otherwise updated. Debian is an OS of choice for CIs and 
workstations because of its stability. I can certainly see a situation where 
developers are given access to a beefy server to do their development on, 
because developing on their Windows laptops (often encumbered with IT-required 
virus and IP-protection scanning) is not acceptable, and the IT admins install 
a stable Linux distribution to lower their maintenance costs.

This is where Linux development environments differ from Windows and Mac ones: 
we expect people to be on the latest macOS and latest Xcode, and on Windows 
the developer tools are completely detached from the OS anyway.

Plus, there's a question of just how recent the minimum version would be. We 
try not to require something too recent and CMake 3.26 is *now* only 19 months 
old. There are no other dependencies in Qt that have a minimum this recent. We 
try to give at least 2 years.

And this *is* the latest stable from Debian. It's not like we're talking about 
oldstable as is the case of the Yocto LTS discussion. And also not like the 
QNX case where "stable" = "stale" because they only upgrade once a decade or 
so. Debian has a very reasonable update cycle for their stable releases.

That also means this problem will solve itself in about 6 months, when Debian 
testing becomes the new stable. So if Alexandru can hold off for just a while 
longer.

> Why should one prioritize folks that want to use the bleeding edge version
> of a particular third-party library, yet can't be arsed to spend 5
> minutes to compile a new version of CMake from source. Everyone
> able to compile Qt from source should have no trouble building CMake
> themselves either, so I don't get why libraries stay on ancient versions
> of CMake just because some users might not have a newer version by default.

Barrier of entry.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Principal Engineer - Intel DCAI Platform & System Engineering
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