Qt5 To Most Likely Stick With Time-Based Released

Written by Michael Larabel in Qt on 25 February 2014 at 02:07 AM EST. 4 Comments
QT
There's been some talk and ideas expressed recently about possibly changing the release process of the Qt tool-kit, but it appears that the process and scheduling will stay the same for the most part with abiding by time-based releases.

Some developers have been interested in seeing Qt go back to doing feature-based releases rather than being time-based. Right now the Qt5 tool-kit is released about every six months regardless of the number of features, but generally with the Qt5 releases thus far they have also been quite heavy on features. Six month release cycles is not good enough for some developers (in either direction) but Lars Knoll decided to chime in on the discussion Monday about changing the Qt release cycle and how branching is done.

Lars wrote to the Qt developers' mailing list, "In my opinion (and having seen 15 years of doing Qt releases), our time based releasing model works better than anything we have been doing before. Feature based releases is what we did in the past, and I do not want to go back. It usually meant rather long delays, and we usually never managed to get more than 1 feature release out per year."

Lars acknowledged that at times there are feature freeze exceptions for Qt, but in general the current six month release cycle is working well. He did acknowledge though some pain in creating releases with branch management of the code still being a hassle. Lars laid out some ideas going forward with having only one development branch for all new development and creating one branch for each minor release and then doing forward merges.

Those interested in more details can find his posting on the Qt development mailing list. Meanwhile the tool-kit release currently under development is Qt 5.3 and it should be released before the summer
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