Subject: [alpine-devel] Alpine and Qt

From: "A. Wilcox" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2017 16:28:33 -0500

Hello Alpinists,

I have noticed that Qt 4 is in main/ and Qt 5 is in community/.  This
seems a little backwards to me.  Qt 4 last had a patch release in
early 2015 and was officially EOL'd 19 December 2015[1].  Considering
its wide code base, and core functionality including networking and
TLS in addition to dependency on other ageing libraries, it seems time
to start sunsetting Qt 4 in Alpine.

Additionally, Qt 5.9 is a "Long Term Support" release.  The 5.9
release currently in Alpine's tree will be supported by upstream until
2020 including bug fixes, stable API, and security updates[2].  This
seems like a great candidate for main/.

The packages in main/ currently dependent on Qt 4 are:

* libechonest        The version in tree already supports Qt 5

* liblastfm          "Experimental" Qt 5 support with version in tree

* openvswitch        The source code was too hard to navigate to tell...

* poppler-qt4        Nothing depends on it in main/

* qca                The version in tree is designed for Qt 5

* qextserialport     Boasts the ability to work unmodified on Qt 2 to 5

* qjson              The version in tree already supports Qt 5

* quazip             The version in tree already supports Qt 5

* v4l-utils          Has had Qt 5 support for almost three years

* wpa_supplicant     The version in tree already supports Qt 5

My personal plan would be:

Move Qt 5 to main.  This should be small effort since the packages are
known to be supported for three years upstream and they are already in
community, not testing.

Then slowly migrate packages in main from Qt 4 to Qt 5.

After all packages are using Qt 5, move Qt 4 to community and wait for
the rest of apps to upgrade to Qt 5 or wither away.

Finally move Qt 4 to unmaintained.

Once Qt 5 is in main, I would be more than willing to assist with the
further steps.  In fact, I will likely begin migrating the packages
from Qt 4 to Qt 5 this weekend in a branch.

Best,
- --arw

[1]:
http://blog.qt.io/blog/2014/11/27/qt-4-8-x-support-to-be-extended-for-an
other-year/

[2]: http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/05/31/qt-5-9-released/

- -- 
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
http://adelielinux.org

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