[Qt-interest] QT windows visual studio 2008 version

[Thiago Macieira]

On Sunday 4. July 2010 18.21.59 David Ching wrote:
> Every time MS releases a Visual Studio service pack affecting
> redistributables, it requires people to rebuild all their modules to be
> compatible, including Qt.  Qt has the same requirement every time they
> release a new "point version", e.g. 4.5 is not compatible with 4.4.  So

That is not correct. Qt 4.5 is compatible with 4.4, Qt 4.6 is compatible with 
4.5 and Qt 4.7 will be compatible with 4.6, 4.5, 4.4, etc.

You don't need to rebuild your app, unless something else affecting the ABI 
changed, like the MS compiler version.

> everyone requires rebuilding the world, eventually.  We may think MS does
> it too often, but we should have a strategy to deal with that effectively
> anyway.
> 
> It is fair to say Qt does *not* have a very good strategy for dealing with
> this.  They did deal with it somewhat successfully with VS2005, as they had
> a separate build for SP1, but they did not carry that strategy forward to
> VS 2008, they did not support the ATL Redistriutable Update releases from
> last summer in either VS 2005 or VS 2008, and I don't think they have

If we upgrade, people who didn't upgrade get upset. If we don't upgrade, 
people who did upgrade get upset.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't, so we try to displease the least amount 
of people. That means trying to guess how many people have already upgraded.

Also, as a matter of policy, we don't introduce support or remove support or 
change the compilers we build with in patch releases.

> released anything for VS 2010.  Speaking of which, VS 2010 has been out
> for some months now, and Qt calls that a Tier 2 platform, and even Windows
> 7 a Tier 2 platform.

Due to lack of resources for building with it and because there hasn't been a 
Qt minor release yet since the official launch of VS2010. The support is coming 
with 4.7.

> So we may call MS wrong-headed for causing some problems, but Qt is equally
> wrong-headed for their slow support of Windows.

Which is a consequence of MS's decisions on their compilers. Just calculate 
how many combinations there are:

	MSVC2005
	MSVC2005 SP1
	MSVC2005 + ATL
	MSVC2008
	MSVC2008 SP1
	MSVC2010

Multiply that by the number of versions of Windows (XP, Vista, 7) and again by 
2 for the 32- and 64-bit variants (yes, we must test them, even if we don't 
make binaries).

However, in fact, I agree with you: we must move faster. So what I'd like us 
to do is stop supporting anything but the latest compiler, plus switch to the 
latest from one patch release to the next. What do you think?

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
  Senior Product Manager - Nokia, Qt Development Frameworks
      PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
      E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C  966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358
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