[Interest] The willy-nilly deletion of convenience, methods

[Volker Hilsheimer]

> On 24 Mar 2021, at 08:43, Max Paperno <max-l at wdg.us> wrote:
> On 3/23/2021 11:44 AM, Volker Hilsheimer wrote:
> ...
>> I personally wonder why people that never want to change what they built last year want to develop software development. Isn’t that what makes building stuff out of bits and ideas so much more interesting  than building stuff out of sticks and stones?
> 
> Wow. Really?  First of all, sheesh, generalize much?


Yes, isn’t that what this thread is for?

“Qt never fixes any bugs”
“QML is horrible, we need to rip it out”
“None of the people that have worked on Qt for the last 25 years can be part of this"
“Every change is harmful"

:P

> Who said anything about "ever?"  Or even "last year."  Have you never built anything that is actually finished, and stays finished, and relevant, and functional for 10, 20, 30 years?  Granted, if I get 10 years of use out of anything built in this century, I do consider it a minor victory.  So maybe that's my answer.


There are evidently (form what has been written here, and from my personal experience of working in and with financial, medical, and telko) industries that prefer 30 year old security issues in their devices over establishing a process that allows them to continuously update their software stack. In which case, yes I personally do think they are missing the point of “software”, and I’m happy that our way of developing Qt is not constrained by those industries.

Yes it’s great if stuff that some of the stuff I built 30 years ago still works (at least I assume it does; I’d have to find a working floppy drive, and a DOS emulator with Turbo Pascal). But then I don’t expect it to look and feel great on the latest macOS version.

I am pretty certain that - as long as you don’t upgrade any part of your software stack including the OS - then the Qt application you build today will run just as fine in 30 years as it does today.


> Clearly Qt devs don't find fixing 5000+ outstanding P2+ bugs all that interesting either.

According to JIRA, we (the entire community of contributors) addressed 240 issues reported to us by customers through our support team in the last 90 days. And a whole bunch more that were reported by Open Source users.

Yes there are plenty more to go around. Yes, some of them are pretty old. To be honest, many of those bugs are really hard to fix without breaking anything else, so often we decide that a known, well-documented bug is preferable to a bunch of new, unknown bugs that a fix might introduce.


> And I personally find building things out of "sticks and stones" immensely interesting and satisfying (assuming it works in the end :). There's no undo or backups, just your skill in the moment. Not to mention very practical, as all those bits and ideas would have nowhere to go otherwise. Comparing physical building to digital creation (which I also enjoy a lot) is only relevant in the most basic sense of "building" in that both require some plan/vision and tools/skills to execute it (and in the end hopefully you get something useful or enjoyable). Otherwise, not even close.


Same here. Just digging a hole in the garden can be very satisfying after a day of writing (code, or emails) :P


> I'd go on to explain that not everyone who uses Qt, lives and breathes Qt, finds it endlessly fascinating, nor has time to conform to your strict and relentless release schedule to evaluate every nuance of massive API changes, etc, etc.


Apropos generalising. Are we still talking about the first release in 7 years where APIs were changed?

FWIW, so far the substance of this discussion seems to boil down to

* the old QList implementation being gone
* toContainer convenience methods removed
* references to QHash entries no longer stable when the hash is mutated


> You rushed Qt6 out the door, contrary to what even some of your core contributors suggested, with the premise that "now we'll get some feedback."  Well there you go, you're getting it now. For many/most I think Qt is a tool, like a very fancy hammer. If Estwing decided to remove the claw from their "new streamlined" framing hammers, then made the clawed hammers cost $1000, I bet they'd get about the same reaction as you're getting now.


Maurice gave the rationale on why Qt 6 was released with a subset of core modules. For the technical side of things, we are getting feedback, it’s useful, and it’s mostly encouraging.

For feedback regarding the licensing changes made that context (including 5.15), I’d suggest you go back to the respective email thread if you just want to vent, or call your sales rep in The Qt Company.


Cheers,
Volker