[Interest] My first 5 years with Qt and 2 suggestions

[Shawn Rutledge]

> On 10 May 2019, at 01:20, Hamish Moffatt <hamish at risingsoftware.com> wrote:
> 
> Actually, I'd turn this around and say shame on the Qt project for not publishing packages, at least for the major distributions.
> 
> It's Debian's policy to publish stable releases which don't change except for security and other essential updates. There is no argument for updating Qt in a stable release.

So “stable” just means old in practice, and thus uninteresting for developers.  Same thing with Ubuntu and Raspbian and others that have been influenced by this belief that older software has fewer bugs by definition, or that known bugs with known workarounds are better than fewer bugs.  But Qt 5.12 is LTS, so I think every contemporary LTS distro ought to be using it, because it will still be getting fixes for about as long as the distro is supported.

What reminded me again most recently was the announcement that brand-new Gnu GUIX 1.0 was just released a few days ago:

https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/blog/2019/gnu-guix-1.0.0-released/

“Guix follows a so-called 'rolling release' model, so you can run guix pull at any time to get the latest and greatest bits of free software.”  But Qt 5.11.3 … ugh.  https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/Q/  One would think if their goal is a rolling release that they probably have tried to automate building newer stuff and trying to upgrade continuously.  (Maybe it will get ramped up soon?)  For Arch on the other hand it just doesn’t seem to be a big deal: Qt gets released almost simultaneously with our releases, the applications that depend on it are getting rebuilt pretty often too, and it almost always just works.