Qt 5.6LTS vs 5.7+

[Duncan]

René J.V. Bertin posted on Sat, 03 Sep 2016 20:15:37 +0200 as excerpted:

> On Saturday September 03 2016 18:02:42 Duncan wrote:
> 
> Thanks Duncan,
> 
> 
>>Some plasma components in particular already have had commits bumping to
>>qt-5.7 minimum.  In some cases they were reverted, but I don't believe
>>all of them have been.
> 
> That's more or less what I was a bit afraid of. I do have some questions
> about the whole idea of having a LTS Qt release, much as I'd love not
> having to worry about updating such a central bit of code every few
> months. However, I also think something like KF5 Plasma shouldn't have
> the latest Qt version as a minimum requirement. But that's just me, I'm
> not the kind of dev who's always ready to pounce on each and every new
> gimmick ;)

The thing with plasma (in the larger sense as the desktop including kwin, 
etc) is that they're working very hard on wayland support right now.  
Kwin in particular, but some other components as well, are very active 
commit-wise, with most of the commits having to do with wayland support 
in one way or another.  (Even indirectly, they've split kwin into semi-
independent modules including backends for wayland and x11, among others, 
and even the commits to the x11 backend are often related to continuing 
to move things around as they find only x11 needs them so they're moved 
into that backend, or wayland needs some of the code too, so they're 
moved to the common code.)

Given the newness of that code in qt as well, I'd guess the wayland 
support, directly or indirectly, is a big part of why they're requiring 
qt-5.7 for various plasma components.  I'm no qt expert, but I wouldn't 
be surprised if that's one reason why 5.6 was chosen as an LTS as well -- 
they can continue there with the immature wayland code and/or possibly 
remove it and tell people to upgrade to 5.7+ for wayland, while 5.7 
should then be able to move some stuff around in ordered to not cripple 
further development and maturation of wayland support, tho it'll likely 
be 5.8/5.9 or 6.x before the qt wayland support really matures and hits 
its stride.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
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