Required VS compiler

[Dominik Haumann]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 7:51 AM, Thomas Friedrichsmeier
<thomas.friedrichsmeier at ruhr-uni-bochum.de> wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Mar 2016 22:07:57 +0100
> Dominik Haumann <dhaumann at kde.org> wrote:
[...]
>> Therefore, I would like to propose v2015 as required compiler
>> and Qt5.6 as required Qt version on Windows, or are there
>> reasons against it?
>
> I'll put it the other way around. Annoying as it is, does that
> QStringLiteral nuisance justify upping the requirements? Factually that
> _is_ going to happen as the MSVC 2013 (and 2012) builds are
> going to get less testing. But I don't think that is a state we should
> actively rush into. Increased requirements always come with an
> increased cost.

True, and yes, the Windows version already now has very few testers, I
don't think we can maintain that in any sane way.

But true, we can wait a bit more.

> I don't know if anybody is producing fully official windows binaries
> based on KF5, yet. But once I will be doing that for RKWard, I know I
> will appreciate a somewhat stable environment. Say I just want to pull
> in a fix in framework X. I may have to update some dependencies, too,
> but I hope it will not mean _starting from scratch_ (new compiler, new
> Qt, etc.).
>
> Also, suppose Qt 5.6.0 turns out to have some nasty bug that I just
> can't work around. Keeping backwards compatibility with Qt 5.5 forever
> is not an option, but discarding fallback options, again, carries a
> cost.

Yes, but then again updates will come soon. This is only a real issue
if you want to release now with a buggy 5.6.0.

>> Qt 5.5 is not precompiled for MSVC 2015, that's why increasing
>> the Qt version should be fine, especially since 5.6 is an LTS
>> version.
>
> Note that with Qt 5.5, MSVC 2013 was the _only_ supported compiler for
> QtWebEngine, not just for pre-built binaries. So MSVC 2013 would have
> been one of the most obvious choices up until one week ago.

As said, we can wait with such an update.

However, I still think that e.g. when people meet in Randa soon, it
would make sense to have them aligned with respect to the used Qt
version.

Greetings,
Dominik