[Releasing] Drafting Qt 5 Beta announcement

[lars.knoll at nokia.com]

On 6/7/12 5:50 PM, "ext Quim Gil" <quim.gil at nokia.com> wrote:

>Hi, we want to have the Qt 5 Beta announcement page ready days before
>the actual release in order to avoid unnecessary last minute rush.
>
>This time it will be a static HTML page in order to offer a nicer layout
>than the wiki pages. The drawback is that you will need access to one of
>the editors (Alexandra, Carol, MariusG, myself) if you need last minute
>changes.
>
>The idea is to work on the content of
>http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt-5-Alpha and update wherever is needed.
>Lars & co, can you help answering these questions? Don't worry about
>final wording as long as you give us the relevant info:
>
>
>- What have been the relevant activities between the alpha release and
>now? We are looking for things to highlight in the summary as well as
>new details in the What's New section.

Apart from lots and lots of bug fixes here are the features I know of in
qtbase:

* Quite a bit more work on the reference platforms. Qt Creator compiles
and runs
  rather well now against Qt 5
* A few cleanups of new API (renaming some methods, etc)
* Qt now expects source code to be encoded in UTF-8.
* Merged the new QUrl implementation
* Unify data structure behind QVector, QString and QByteArray
* New metaobject revision, better API for QmetaObject and more perform an
access
to QObject's meta data
* Upgrade to Unicode 6.1
* New plugin system is a must now for Qt 5 apps
* Refactoring and cleanups in Qt Print Support module
* Preliminary ANGLE support on Windows (to avoid the problem of bad GL
drivers)
* Enable C++11 support by default on compilers supporting it
* Disable exceptions on many Qt modules that don't require it (saving
space/size)
* started modularizing our documentation (no real effect to end user, but
should help improve the doc quality over time)
* Fixed a lot of pending TODO items for Qt 5
* Improvements to QNX support
* QHash hash key randomization (potential security issue)
* Moved QIcon back to QtGui

QtQml and QtQuick didn't really get any new features, but a huge amount of
bug fixes, memory usage improvements and optimizations.

Most other modules got minor improvements and bug fixes.

>
>- I guess there are no changes in the Essentials modules?
>http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt-Essentials-Modules

No, the list is the same as before.
>
>- Are we including Add-on modules in the release? If so, will they be
>part of the same binary as Essentials or shipped separately?

I think there will be some add-ons in the binary package, but I'd need to
check details.
>
>- Any new modules that weren't released in the alpha?

Hopefully QtWebKit on windows.
>
>- The announcement assumes that there is a page with the binaries for
>download and any relevant instructions. Who is working on that page and
>can you share the URL?

Simon, can you fill this in, please?
>
>- Any changes to the What's New section?
>http://qt-project.org/wiki/Qt-5-Alpha#33871b6190a8d5adbe8b15282054766c
>Otherwise we will keep it as is.

See above.
>
>- Any changes in the Known Issues section? Otherwise we will keep what
>we have.

Would need to go through it in detail. Something for next week.
>
>- New screenshots, videos, demos, examples etc are welcome. Otherwise we
>will rely on what we had for the alpha.
>
>Anything else? Just tell us.  :)

Let's make sure we get the message right, that Qt 5 is actually rather
usable for people coming from Qt 4.x.Some talking points we should cover:

* The porting effort should be minor in most cases. Can we maybe get some
case studies here?
	- Qt Creator  compiles against Qt 4.x and Qt 5 out of a single code base
* QWidgets work and are supported, but not actively developed further
* Qt Quick messaging
* Qt Quick Desktop components should be mentioned as ongoing work to make
Qt Quick a full solution
  for desktop OSes

Cheers,
Lars