Qt-contributors-summit-2014-Long term releases

Long-term releases

• We’ve managed to make 6-month releases
  • No change in schedule time: we want to continue doing 6-months
  • Modulo adjustments so we don’t release too close to vacation periods
• Release process is improving
  • Ability to do package creation much more quickly
  • Unification of packages with enterprise/commercial will also reduce workload
• How long should long-term releases be?
  • More than every 2 releases
  • Probably every 18-24 months (3 or 4 releases)
• First LTS release should be either 5.3 or 5.4
  • Digia wants to do a business check first and will let us know
  • 5.3 is a good candidate because we focused on stability
• Doing LTS buys us a few benefits:
  • We can deprecate platforms and compilers after the LTS release
  • Targets to be dropped as soon as feasible:
    • Windows XP
    • OS X 10.6
    • MSVC 2008
    • GCC < 4.6
• Procedure:
  • Bugs to be fixed should be security bugs, P0, P1
    • P2 can be fixed, exceptionally, if no workaround is possible
  • Fix is applied to the LTS branch and then merged to the next releases
  • Releases should be based on amount of changes made, like what we’re doing for 4.8