Talk Of Qt 4.9, Backporting Qt 5.0 Features

There's a proposal to come up with a Qt 4.9 release, which would back-port more of the Qt 5.0 features to Qt4.

While Qt developers are busy on issuing the long-awaited beta and transitioning to Digia, a proposal hit the Qt development list this morning concerning Qt 4.9.

Qt 5 has a number of new features, that could be relatively easy backported into Qt 4 without breaking backward compatibility [1], notably new classes (unrelated to QPA), new methods, and new macros.

The rationale for doing a Qt 4.9 release rather than telling everyone to jump to Qt 5.0 straight-away comes down to large code-bases may need more time to port to Qt5, there's no QWS in Qt5, some platforms may be unavailable for Qt5 or have a lower port quality than what's available now with Qt4, and for integration of new QtWebKit 2.3 into Qt4.

Among the potential features mentioned in the original proposal include QJson, QMessageLogger, QRegularExpression, QStandardPaths, new methods QtNetwork module and QSslCertificateExtension, QLocalServer::liste(), new QtTest macros, and maybe other features that can back-ported to Qt4 easily and reliably.

The proposal for the Qt 4.9 release is still in early stages of discussion on the mailing list.