[Releasing] [Development] buildsystem now needs to keep behaviour compatibility

Oswald Buddenhagen oswald.buddenhagen at theqtcompany.com
Wed Dec 9 11:44:33 CET 2015


On Wed, Dec 02, 2015 at 01:04:40PM +0100, Olivier Goffart wrote:
> On Wednesday 2. December 2015 10:17:57 Joerg Bornemann wrote:
> > We should then keep build tests for these modules in the CI.
> > Otherwise we won't notice breakages.
> 
> I agree.
> 
this is true.
but that basically defeats the whole point, which was not needing to
care about these modules any more.

now reality caught up already and it turns out that i broke webkit.
well, what i actually did, i broke bug-to-bug compatibility, which
exposed a pre-existing problem in webkit, as it usually goes.

it would be possible to revert the respective qmake change (and uglify
the surrounding code), but i don't think it's reasonable to enforce this
type of stagnation - we generally accept that code which relies on
undefined or outright broken behavior is broken by fixes.

so how do we go from there? i see several options:
- continue to drag along webkit and the other deprecated modules. the
  additional cost of actually doing that in addition to compatibility
  testing is rather low with the new CI.
- release further 5.5.x versions of these modules when necessary. i
  expect this to be a lot more effort than the first option, so it
  doesn't seem reasonable.
- simply accept that it's broken, and tell people to apply patches.



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