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

[Scott Bloom]

Sorry for top posting...

But I disagree here.  Even for mac, Qt 5 is 9 years old, 4 lived 6 (4.0->4.8 LTS initial release, 4.8 lived for 3 years)

Im not saying we go to a Qt Major version for every mac system style change.  But if they produce a SDK where previous version is so different than the new one, that the same Qt code needs a #ifdef XXX version, so be it.

Yes, its more work.

Scott

-----Original Message-----
From: Hamish Moffatt <hamish at risingsoftware.com> 
Sent: Friday, March 26, 2021 17:40
To: Scott Bloom <scott at towel42.com>; interest at qt-project.org
Subject: Re: [Interest] the path forward - that 7 year thing - was willy-nilly

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 compiler/OS no longer valid to target?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