Digia's Qt Commercial Still Carrying Large Patch Delta

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Digia's Qt Commercial Still Carrying Large Patch Delta

In 2011 when talking about Digia putting out new Qt Commercial releases with over one hundred changes compared to what's found in the open-source/community Qt repository, many Phoronix readers were upset by this large delta. Digia is still putting out new Qt Commercial releases that carry large differences to the upstream open-source releases, but they've offered up the patches for mainline integration...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTA0NTM

[TheBlackCat]

So in other words, the open-source Qt group has moved on to Qt 4.8 while Digia apparently has some clients who want to keep using Qt 4.7, so Digia is willing to do the work of maintaining Qt 4.7 for both their clients and the open-source group if anyone in the open-source group actually cares. I am not sure what there is to be upset about here. Not only are they not keeping their patches to themselves, they are apparently willing to support an old Qt release for free for anyone who wants it, a release that the open-source developers are not willing to maintain themselves.

[rohcQaH]

The issue was not that they're backporting patches, the issue was that they were creating fixes that weren't made available for upstream inclusion.

Though the way I understand it, they weren't deliberately holding back; it was just a process issue. Which they seem to be fixing now.

[pmorph]

Is that a large delta? Doesn't a project as big as Qt have 100+ patches in the works at any given time..

[TheBlackCat]

The issue was not that they're backporting patches, the issue was that they were creating fixes that weren't made available for upstream inclusion.

I don't think that was the issue in either case. In the 4.8.0 release the patches were made available upstream, but upstream didn't include them. In this case there was no upstream, since there were no plans to release a Qt 4.7.5.

[hjpriester]

I don't it is that black / white.

From the release notes:
Here are some Qt Commercial 4.7.5 release statistics:

Overall 216 fixes and improvements compared to Qt Commercial 4.7.4 release
153 important functionality fixes and 63 fixes for documentation
35 fixes from the Qt 4.7 branch
181 fixes back-ported from the Qt 4.8 branch
19 fixes specifically for Windows
12 fixes specifically for Mac OS X
9 fixes specifically for Linux

So the minority of the fixes is back-port where the Nokia-QT people don't care. They say use 4.8 which fixes the bugs and introduces new bugs

Anyway I am a user of Digia-QT and one of my bugs against 4.8 has been fixed by a Digia employer and offered to Qt as merge request.
Also the are 35 fixes included from the 4.7 brach so if you use the git version you have then.
After more then 4 weeks the fix is still not in mainline...probably a lack of time for the maintainer or no interest.
The bugs I have reported to Digia end up in the official QT bugreport database and if there is a fix a merge request is attached.