[Marble-devel] Ending Marble support for Qt 4.x / 15.08 LTS release

[Torsten Rahn]

Hi there,

The Qt Project's Qt 4.8 support will officially end on December 19th, 2015. 

We have provided support for Qt 4 and Qt 5 in parallel for a couple of releases now.
With the upcoming end of support for Qt 4 by the Qt Project we are also ending support for Qt 4 in Marble.

As a commitment to our developers who still use Qt 4 as their foundation we'd like to declare 
the KDE 15.08 Marble 1.12 release a Long Term Support (LTS) release where we will continue to 
backport critical and major bug fixes to the library as needed.
So starting with the next release we will support Qt 5 only. 
Qt 5 is going strong these days and Qt 5 releases are mature, well-deployed across platforms and provide significant advantages over prior Qt 4 releases. And we've seen many projects who depend on Marble moving to Qt 5 already - so we think that our move meets our developers' expectations.

We have  just submitted the required patch for this move to master and it reduced the amount of source code in Marble by > 1000 lines of code. For us it means that we can provide better support for Qt 5 and deliver a better tested Marble release across platforms.

Best Regards,

Your Marble Development Team


http://commits.kde.org/marble/02cac232e9cf1ae45d2a941d2287d4de12e00e0d