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

[Thiago Macieira]

On Wednesday, 24 March 2021 04:48:08 PDT Roland Hughes wrote:
> On 3/24/21 6:00 AM, interest-request at qt-project.org wrote:
> > The exact opposite is the correct thing:
> >   - deprecation messages while compiling the source code are correct
> >   - messages to the mailing list are not sufficient
> 
> No, it's not. It only seems correct if you live in a world where nothing
> lasts six months.
> 
> Out in the real product world you create some product using Qt 3.x or
> 4.2. That product goes to production where it remains for 7-15+ years.

I stand by what I said and I live in the real world. You clearly live in a 
different, also real world. I don't doubt any of the claims you make are true. 
I do doubt that they are the majority or even significant. The majority of the 
uses I am familiar with last much shorter than 7 years. At the very least, 
there are opportunities in those 7 years to do incremental progress or keep up 
with the latest.

Qt's horizon is about 7 years.

Anything coded to Qt 3.x needs to ported first to 4.8, before going to 5.0. 
Once you're in the 5.x series, port to 5.15 and fix the warnings. Once you're 
clean in a working build, port to Qt 6.

You've got all warnings you needed to make progress in each of those steps.

You may not like some of those changes. Then I suggest that you should have 
complained when Qt 5.15 became available with those warnings. And do note 
about half of the warnings were introduced before 5.15, so where were those 
people when those releases were made and the warnings added?

> Now the product needs to be redeveloped/enhanced because the benefits
> now outweigh the costs of spin-up. 

That's why you need to do it incrementally and you shouldn't wait to do it. 
Keep up to date in those 15 years, even if you don't actually release a new 
product with those updated versions.

> The very first time you find out everything that got nuked is today.

Like I said, I can't help if feedback wasn't given at the time that there was 
time to accept such feedback. You may say that going away for 15 years and 
then complaining is acceptable in some industries. It clearly isn't in this.

You may not like that statement. It's true nonetheless.

> Given the current state of Qt and the willy-nilly nuking of things, both
> of these companies are going to have to go with CopperSpice or some
> other competitor. Qt 6 isn't usable and Qt 5 has no LTS unless they want
> to support the ex-wife in a manner she would like to become accustomed to.

We are not nuking things willy-nilly. You may not like what we removed, you 
may not like the process, but it was documented, over a period of time, all 
the removals were for a reason. 

So stop the FUD. 

Want to have a reasonable conversation over things that were removed but are 
still useful? Count me in. We can figure out how to address those issues.

Otherwise, invent a time machine and provide us with feedback one year ago.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel DPG Cloud Engineering