[Qgis-developer] Qt4->Qt5 timeline: Qt4's status and Qt4's webkit removal in Stretch

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 05/02/2015 10:19 AM, Luigi Pirelli wrote:
> basing of these info, timeline for transition is imposed by debian distribution
> 
> http://perezmeyer.blogspot.com.es/2015/05/qt4s-status-and-qt4s-webkit-removal-in.html

Triggered by this announcement, a recent bugreport about the Qt4WebKit
removal [1], and the discussion on this list, I've investigated
switching the qgis Debian package to Qt5.

In Debian there are at least two missing dependencies before the qgis
package can be switched to Qt5: python-qscintilla2 from the qscintilla2
source package, and libqwt-dev from the qwt source package.

qwt is currently at version 6.0.0, which is not intended for Qt5
according to upstream, for Qt5 Qwt >= 6.1 should be used. There is a
bugreport requesting an update to Qwt 6.1 from 2013 [2]. Fortunately
Ubuntu already has qwt 6.1.1 [3]. This packaging can be merged back into
Debian, Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer said he might take a look at
that.

qscintilla2 only provides Python 3 bindings for Qt5, there doesn't seem
to be a Qt5 equivalent for python-qscintilla2. So we may need to switch
QGIS to Python 3 too.

How feasible is switching to Python 3?

The Python maintainers in Debian strive to move away from Python 2 in
the next two development cycles (for stretch & buster) as announced [4]
earlier. The qgis package will need to switch in that time frame too.

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/784514
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/733153
[3] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/qwt
[4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2015/04/msg00005.html

Kind Regards,

Bas

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