Qt 6.1 Feature Freeze Now In Effect

While Qt 6.0 wasn't even released a full two months ago, the Qt 6.1 feature freeze went into effect this morning in trying to get out this next update sooner.

This year's Qt 6.1 and Qt 6.2 releases are expected to be released on a tighter timeline than the prior cadence. If all goes well this means Qt 6.1 will be out before the end of April, barring any delays.

This quicker release is useful in getting out more improvements atop the Qt6 code-base compared to the primitive Qt 6.0. Coming out sooner is also good news as Qt 6.0 is missing a number of modules/features from Qt5 that some yet can't port their code to this evolutionary toolkit upgrade but at the same time Qt 5.15 LTS updates are already commercial-only.

There is the Qt Wiki feature page noting changes for Qt 6.1. That list, however, is currently incomplete. Among the additions noted there are improvements to QFuture, overflow-safe arithmetic functions, other new Qt core functions, and QtNetworkCookie now supports the SameSite functionality. Via the Qt package manager, available with Qt 6.1 are Qt Charts, Qt Data Visualization, and Qt State Machines.

So now with today's feature freeze no more features are allowed nor API changes. Already raised on the mailing list was the possibility though of some lingering patches still being merged since the Qt continuous integration (CI) infrastructure has been down for much of the past week, so there is the possibility of a few more patches still being let in for this H1'2021 Qt6 update.

The Qt 6.1 Alpha release is expected in the next week or so followed by the beta releases beginning around the end of February. Qt 6.1.0 is aiming to be out on 27 April.