Qt 6.1, Qt 6.2 Expected To Come Sooner With Tightened Release Cycles
Normally Qt is on a six-month release cadence but next year's Qt 6.1/6.2 releases will likely be tightened up both to address a long-standing gripe of the current timing that often puts new releases around summer holidays and the Thanksgiving~Christmas holiday season. To try to move off those May and November~December release windows, they are looking at tightening up the cycles for Qt 6.1 and Qt 6.2, with the latter being the first long-term support release of the Qt6 series.
Lars Knoll is proposing that Qt 6.1 be shipped by the end of April which would put the feature freeze already at the end of January. But for Qt 6.1 the emphasis anyhow will likely be on bug fixing and stability improvements after all the changes in Qt 6.0, so a tightened up Qt 6.1 release makes sense.
Qt 6.2 would also see a shorter release cycle that would put the feature freeze at the end of June and its official release at the end of September. Having the second Qt release of the year in September rather than November~December would do much better for avoiding developer time-off periods around the end of year holidays.
With Qt 6.2 we are likely to see most modules not yet ported to Qt6 from Qt 5.15 brought over and other fixing and stability improvements made ahead of that LTS release. After Qt 6.2 LTS ships is when we will likely see an uptick in adoption of Qt6 toolkit usage by programs.
After Qt 6.2 they would likely return to their normal six month release and then on track at that point for releasing around every April and September.
Lars Knoll laid out the tentative 6.1/6.2 plans this morning on the Qt development list.
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