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

[Thiago Macieira]

On Wednesday, 24 March 2021 17:21:31 PDT Scott Bloom wrote:
> Hard failure here.  Because Qt decided to change the list of supported
> compilers and OSes in the Qt 5 timeframe, (another major problem with the
> Qt universe), I know of many companies stuck at 5.12.  BTW, that includes
> Intel on two projects I know of 

That was not new policy.

We started Qt 4 supporting HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, Solaris, in addition to the free 
Unix (the BSDs and Linux), macOS (then called Mac OS X) and Windows. During 
Qt 4's lifetime, we dropped IRIX, then HP-UX on PA-RISC, then HP-UX on 
Itanium. By the time 5.0 came around, Solaris went the way of the dodo. Qt 4.0 
also supported the non-Unicode Windows (95, 98, Me), but that codebase was 
removed in 4.4 or 4.5 too.

Qt used to support Tru64 on Alpha at some point in time before 4.0. I don't 
know exactly when because the code was gone by the time I arrived in Oslo 
(Volker might remember).

So this policy had existed since at least 2004.

It sucks when it's your turn to be left out of support. My first Mac Mini, 
from 2011, which I used to test Qt on (and used for nothing else), was happily 
chugging along with Apple updates until Mojave (I think). At that point, Apple 
decided that they needed a 2013 Mac Mini or later for updates.

> I have customers who REQUIRE (as in I don’t have a choice) using CentOS 6. 
> We tried and failed to back port 5.15 to it.

Qt 5.15 was released on 2020-05-20. RHEL 6.0 was released 2010-11-10. That's a 
nine and a half year old system by then. That's when most library versions 
were frozen. The current Qt release at the time was 4.7.1.

I really admire you for trying (and I hope you were being well-compensated). 
But I do not envy your position and I do not want to share in your pain.

> And yes, we know 6.0 has been end of life'd, is insecure, has problems etc
> etc.. You tell them, well just enter the modern world, stop developing
> billion dollar systems by choosing an OS to start with and not allowing
> major OS changes until the version the team is working on is finished.

Wikipedia says RHEL 6 ELS will be supported through 2024. Red Hat must be 
making a good chunk of money from customers like yours to still support kernel 
2.6.32.

> And while you are at it, convince the intel internal rtl lint team to do the
> same.

We're not using CentOS 6. We're using SUSE Linux Enterprise 11. That's a whole 
3 years newer! At least it's kernel 3.0!

Any discussions we may or may not have had with them, I can't say.

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