Would distributions have an issue if KF 5.77+ would require Qt >= 5.14 (instead of >= 5.13 as of now)?

[Neal Gompa]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2020 at 7:14 AM Friedrich W. H. Kossebau
<kossebau at kde.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> last week KDE Frameworks master saw a bump in the required/expected minimal Qt
> version to Qt 5.13, following rules once agreed and noted here:
> https://community.kde.org/Frameworks/Policies#Frameworks_Qt_requirements
>
> I would like to challenge that former decision though and propose to instead
> go straight to Qt 5.14 as minimum requirement now.
>
>
> QUESTION:
> Would any of the distributions have an issue with requiring Qt 5.14 instead of
> Qt 5.13?
>
>
> From some quick checks using https://repology.org/ it seems that any
> distribution versions which currently use Qt 5.13 have also settled on some
> older KF version, so will not update to just KF 5.77 and thus be screwed.
>
> Motivation:
> * KDE CI not setup ATM to cover builds with Qt 5.13 (no build, no unit tests)
> * Qt 5.14 added some new API, chance to miss out when using that in new code
> * C++: no need to write #if QT_VERSION < QT_VERSION_CHECK(5, 14, 0) variants
> * QML: no need to do hard-to-read generation tricks to support < Qt 5.14
> * Qt 5.13 went out-of-support in June
> * App bundle builders would rather use some recent Qt 5.14/5.15
>
> So by restraining to Qt 5.13 as minimum version IMHO we would make/keep life
> complicated for KF contributors without adding any value for anyone.
>
> With most of KDE Frameworks in my local checkout:
>     grep "QT_VERSION_CHECK(5, 14, 0)"  frameworks/*/src -r 2>/dev/null | \
>         grep "QT_VERSION " | wc -l
> gives me "92", so there are quite some code variants which need support in
> current code.
>
> From the emails at least in https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-frameworks-devel/2020-July/112712.html I could not see a discussion whether Qt 5.13 makes
> sense at all now, seems mainly the algorithm was applied. I propose to match
> the result to known real world needs now. Or teach me what I have missed here
> :)
>

The change to Qt 5.13 already broke us for RHEL/CentOS 8 (which has Qt
5.12), but we should be fine for Fedora.



--
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!