[Qgis-developer] Qt5 and Python 3

[Bas Couwenberg]

On 2016-05-04 15:08, Matthias Kuhn wrote:
>> For the upstream QGIS packages this may be an option, for the official
>> packages in the Debian archive it is not.
> 
> Understandable.
> 
> I had a look at past Debian releases, extrapolating the release cycle 
> we
> can expect the next release to happen in about a year.
> 
> I don't expect a first QGIS release based on Qt5 to happen considerably
> earlier. The first LTR based on Qt5 will certainly not happen earlier.
> 
> Just to make sure we talk about the same order of delays. (Note: this
> timeline has not been officially approved)

Debian will switch to Qt5 with QGIS 2.16, otherwise there will be no 
QGIS in the next stable release.

The Qt4 builds currently still work because the Qt maintainers didn't 
want to break QGIS before Qt5 support is available, but the Qt4WebKit 
removal changes have already been committed and will be included in the 
next upload. The upload may happen sooner than we'd like if important 
bugfixes need to be uploaded in the near future.

The changes affecting QGIS is the next stable release will arrive 
earlier than a year from now. The freeze was planned for 5 November 
2016, but has been moved two months to align with the expected 4.10 
kernel release. [0]

With the full freeze in February 2016, I expect the release to happen in 
Q3 2016, may be even Q4. The Qt4WebKit removal will happen before the 
transition freeze on 5 November 2016.

Based on the QGIS release schedule as it stands now, the plans for QGIS 
in Debian are discussed in the "QGIS 2.14 & Qt5" thread on the 
debian-gis list. [1] That is switching to Qt5 with the 2.16 non-LTR, and 
switch back to the 3.x LTRs for unstable/testing & backports.

The choices for the upstream QGIS packages are not really relevant for 
Debian, it just makes the packaging changes in Debian less relevant to 
forward upstream.

[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2016/03/msg00000.html
[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-gis/2016/02/msg00037.html

Kind Regards,

Bas