[opensuse-kde] Re: Can Plasma 5.9 depend on Qt 5.7

On Tuesday, October 25, 2016 12:50:56 PM CEST Richard Brown wrote:

Hi Martin,

The initial openSUSE view is as follows:

For openSUSE Leap, this decision will likely mean that we will have to remain with Qt 5.6 and Plasma 5.8 for the life of Leap 42.3 in order to preserve our stability expectations of our users.

Right. Using Qt 5.7 optionally would also not help you there as that would mean that features we advertised would not be available on openSUSE which would be bad from a communication point of view for both openSUSE and KDE.

As we discussed with you at oSC, Qt version jumps seem to bring a very high risk of breakages across a very broad scope, and I expect it would probably be too much of a risk to take in Leap 42.3.

understandable

Leap 42.3's release is currently expected Q3/4 2017

So in about a year. So that's two or three Plasma releases from now. I guess we would have the same discussion with every release then.

The expected lifecycle of Leap 42.3 would mean I'd expect it to be supported for ~18 months from that point.

This means in one way or another we'll have to find a way to support Plasma 5.8 until the middle of 2019

This is of course much longer than the currently announced lifecycle of Plasma 5.8, which I understand will end about the middle of 2018.

A 'year in the wilderness' is quite an uncomfortable situation for us to consider.

So about half a year more than currently planed. I guess that's doable. I assume that at that time all that matters are security fixes which we probably would do anyway for older releases (the last fix I backported even to 5.0). And you would have an updated frameworks and thus all the fixes coming from that.

We'd need to have a lot of discussions between our Release Team and KDE maintainers to figure out if we even have a feasible solution for coping with such a situation.

sure! Actually I don't see much difference on whether we depend on Qt 5.7 or not. I assume that even if we would not raise Qt dependency Plasma 5.11 would not be useful for you as it would be not as long supported as Plasma 5.8. So overall for openSUSE Leap the important question seems to be how to get Plasma 5.8 maintained half a year longer as currently planned upstream. I just assume that will be doable :-)

For openSUSE Tumbleweed, I imagine this presents no problem as we're already using Qt 5.7 there

yep.

Hope this helps,

Thanks for your feedback. Much appreciated that you communicate needs for your next year release that early. Cheers Martin

Richard

On 25 October 2016 at 08:16, Martin Graesslin wrote:

...

Hi distributions,

the Plasma team would like to depend on Qt 5.7 for the next Plasma release (5.9). Reasons are among others, that we would like to use: * appmenu support * QtVirtualKeyboard support * QtQuickControls 2

Which are all new in Qt 5.7.

We would like to know whether that would cause a problem for any distribution. Please remember that Plasma 5.8 is an LTS and will stay on Qt 5.6.

Cheers Martin