Sunsetting Qt 5

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Samstag, 30. November 2024 11:51:51 Mitteleuropäische Normalzeit Albert 
Astals Cid wrote:
> El dissabte, 30 de novembre del 2024, a les 4:57:10 (Hora estàndard del
> Centre
> d’Europa), Ben Cooksley va escriure:
> > HI all,
> > 
> > This past week or so i've been dealing with a number of issues relating to
> > a handful of still Qt 5 based projects trying to make use of updated
> > dependencies. These issues have revealed that the level of support for Qt
> > 5
> > as a platform in general is now subject to a significant degree of
> > bit-rot.
> > As such, we need to set a point at which we consider Qt 5 to no longer be
> > supported.
> > 
> > To start I would like to remove support for all CD builds (Windows,
> > Appimage, macOS) as well as CI support for Windows. There is already a
> > general view in Craft that Qt 5 is unmaintained and this removal simply
> > reflects that.
> 
> If the Craft maintainers don't want to maintain Qt5 and no one steps up I
> guess that's understandable.

The qt5-lts branch of Craft is no longer maintained officially since months. 
Those few projects who still use this branch mostly know how to deal with this 
and do the work themselves. As such it's IMHO unfair and untrue to say that Qt 
5 is unmaintained in Craft. It's just not maintained anymore by Hannah, Julius 
and others who maintain the Qt 6 branches of Craft.

Many of the projects which still do Qt 5 based releases on Windows are 
lighthouse projects, e.g. Kdenlive, KMyMoney, KStars. I don't think pulling 
the rug under their feet is fair. (I didn't forget Krita. They maintain their 
own CI/CD jobs as far as I know.)

Isn't there a middle ground like keeping the last working Qt 5 CI images but 
not creating/updating them anymore? It's not as if the Qt 5 based projects 
would need to use the latest published Qt 5.15.x release or the latest 
versions of their other dependencies for patch releases. In the Craft builds 
they could still use newer versions of their dependencies but for CI the 
versions would be frozen.

I do agree that new feature releases which need the newest versions of some 
third-party dependencies should be Qt 6 based.

Regards,
Ingo
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