Qt Is Looking At Making Qt 5.6 A Long-Term Support Release

Qt developers are currently figuring out plans for doing a long-term support release of their open-source toolkit as they'll soon be dropping support for a number of aging platforms.

At least year's Qt Contributor Summit it was decied that Qt 5.5 would be the last version supporting GCC 4.6, OS X 10.7, Windows Vista, Windows Embedded Compact 7, QNX 6.5, and Qt WebKit / Qt Script / Qt Quick 1. With those platforms being dropped, Qt developers would like to do a long-term support version and in preparing for next year's Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release that will make heavy use of Qt.

Developers would like to make Qt 5.5 a LTS release, but they want this long-supported release to be done with their new continuous integration system. The issue though is their new CI system is being developed in-step with Qt 5.6, which is pushing back their LTS plans.

In this mailing list thread the developers are now discussing how to proceed. It's looking like Qt 5.6 will become the long-term support release but there's chances it could be pushed back to Qt 5.7. There's also some concern about when Qt will begin making use of C++11 features, which is coming up, but understandably some developers don't want to start pushing C++11 features right before an LTS release.

In other Qt news, the Qt 5.5 release candidate is gearing up for release next week and the official Qt 5.5.0 should be out shortly thereafter.