[Interest] the path forward - that 7 year thing - was willy-nilly

[Hamish Moffatt]

On 27/3/21 11:23 am, Scott Bloom wrote:
> To be clear.  Roland and I are talking about very different issues.
>
> To me, Qt should continue to support OS's/Compilers for the life of a Major version of Qt.  if it built on Qt 5.0 it should build on that OS/Compiler in 5.15
>
> If Qt decides that modern C++ was more important in 5.13, and the compilers available on an OS/Compiler are no longer compiling Qt, then frankly, its time to move to Qt 6
>
> There are many open source tool sets, that have parallel paths for a certain time.  Qt 4 is a good example. The late stage Qt4 was still being supported and new patch versions being put out as Qt 5 was rolling out.
>
> I do NOT expect to start a project in Qt3 on CentOS 3/4 (or whatever it was) to be able to trivially rebuilt in Qt 4, or 5 when I move to CentOS 7
>
> But If Im still using Qt 5.9 LTS, and decide to move to Qt 5.15 (skipping 12), I don’t expect my OSes to no longer be supported.  If there was functionality being added to 13 that made a version of a compiler/OS no longer valid to target? Make that functionality/code for Qt 6


I'm not sure what you're asking is even possible on macOS. They churn 
the compiler and the SDK so quickly compared to the 8 year development 
life of Qt 5.

I would ideally like Qt to support deployment on macOS versions slightly 
older than they do. Not all the way back to what was supported in 5.0 
though.

I don't see any compelling reason to be compiling with the latest Qt on 
ancient compilers/OSs though.


Hamish