Debian Buster Hopes To Drop Qt4

Debian developers are still hoping they will be able to remove the Qt4 tool-kit during the Debian 10 "Buster" development cycle.

While there is still some open and proprietary software continuing to use the Qt4 tool-kit, Debian developers hope they transition soon to Qt5 or another tool-kit.

Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer wrote today, "We will try to put as less effort as possible in keeping it alive meaning that from now on if we need to patch it to make it support a newer lib or alike we will simply remove it's support if possible. Using the OpenSSL case as an example, if we need to support any version > 1.1 we will simply remove the SSL support. That means things will break. So, if you depend on FLOSS which is still based on Qt 4 be sure to try to port it. If you depend on a proprietary vendor software which uses Qt 4 then you better start telling them it's really time to update it. Really."

With Qt 6 planning getting underway and development beginning next year, it's really time to move on from Qt4.