[Interest] [Development] Windows 7 support will be dropped in Qt 6

Sérgio Martins iamsergio at gmail.com
Fri Jun 12 01:07:00 CEST 2020


On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 9:51 PM Roland Hughes
<roland at logikalsolutions.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 6/11/20 1:47 PM, Michael Jackson wrote:
> > Windows 7 is EOL. Period. If it costs you, as a developer, additional money to support an EOL'ed, unsupported version of an operating system then you will need to pass that onto the customer. By still supporting Windows 7 we, as developers, are just enabling those customers to keep from updating. There are very few real reasons*not*  to update to at least Windows 8. At some point the customer needs to understand that they are not going to get any new features. They current piece of software will keep working (Assuming a perpetual license) but nothing new will be supported. I've had requests to back port our software to CentOS 6 and once you explain the cost to them for us to maintain all the extra development hardware, extra engineering to develop codes that are not supported on the old compilers, it becomes cost prohibitive to maintain those versions.
>
> Personally I don't think anyone should be running a virus known as
> Windows on any computer.

> There are major corporations still running Windows XP, let alone 7,
> because they have critical systems written and running on that OS.

They can continue to. And why would critical systems be ported to Qt 6 ?


>The
> tool or whatever cannot port forward or costs massive amounts of money
> to bring forward. Just today someone told me about one of GM's factories
> in Europe is run by a highly customized "canned" factory control system
> written in VB5. When people show up to the factory, it makes vehicles
> every day.
>
> You can't have rolling upgrades on critical systems, you just can't.

Then why would you want to port that to Qt 6 ?


> Upgrading is a multi-million dollar cost adding nothing to the bottom
> line. They really don't care if a third party developer's life is any
> easier, that developer isn't on the payroll and they have an
> auto-renewing can only be cancelled for non-payment support contract.
>
> Windows 7 is EOL in marketing only.

Just like Qt 3, 4 and 5 will be used for many years.

> I'm willing to bet CAT is still using WinCE. They were as of less than a
> year ago because a contract hit my inbox.

Yes CAT for sure won't be ported to Qt 6. Why do you even mention it
on a thread about running Qt6 on Win7 ?


> I don't know how, but Agco has their own version of DOS and is somehow
> using Qt.

And they can continue to, regardless of the outcome of this thread.


> As I said, I don't personally care about Windows. If Qt drops support
> for Windows 7 going forward it will simply shove a big chunk of current
> users (who aren't using QML and JavaScript) to CopperSpice because it
> claims to still be supporting Windows via MinGW all the way back to
> Windows Vista.
>
> https://www.copperspice.com/docs/cs_overview/supported-platforms.html
>
> You cannot force customers to "upgrade" but you can force them to leave.

So their systems are too critical to update software but a port to
CopperSpice is fine ?

All the examples you gave don't care about Qt 6, in fact many of them
don't even run on Qt > 5.6, which dropped support for WinCE and XP.
And that's OK, it's the software lifecycle.


Regards,
Sérgio Martins


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