[Development] Semi-private headers in Qt

[Tor Arne Vestbø]

On 21 May 2026, at 13:30, Volker Hilsheimer via Development <development at qt-project.org> wrote:

One idea I just had was to use the major.minor version number of Qt.

#include <QtGui/6.12/qrhi.h>

The advantage is that you are clearly seeing that you are using an API that is specific to that Qt version.
The disadvantage is that you have to change the include statement when upgrading Qt version, but that might as much be an advantage because it creates awareness - just because things still compile doesn't necessary mean that they also still work the same way. And it can be made very simple by having a single wrapper-header for a project.

Failing that my preference would be either

unstable, unsupported, or semiprivate

I suggest we squash all these uses-cases into an opaque `spi` suffix, which can covers both semi-private (experimental), and service-provider (system integration) interfaces. It’s also short to write :)

#include <QtGui/spi/qplatformwindow.h> // Technically both semi-private and service-provider interface

#include <QtMultimedia/spi/qgstreamvervideosource.h> // Semi private API

Tor Arne
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/attachments/20260521/285adaa9/attachment-0001.htm>