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

Friedrich W. H. Kossebau kossebau at kde.org
Tue Dec 1 12:13:53 GMT 2020


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 
:)

Cheers
Friedrich




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