[QGIS-Developer] Qt6 builds and plugins -- ready for testing!

[Nyall Dawson]

Hi list,

With some excellent work recently completed by Julien, we're now at a stage
where there's no *major* roadblocks preventing plugins from functioning
under the Qt6 builds!

In fact, the first plugin has already been ported to be compatible with
these (First Aid Plugin) -- see
https://github.com/wonder-sk/qgis-first-aid-plugin/commits/master/ .

I think we're now at a stage where wider testing of the Qt6 builds and
feedback via bug reports are valuable. A couple of notes:

- We're up to roughly 2/3rd of the existing Python tests passing on Qt 6
builds. That's obviously not everything, so we aren't finished with this
work yet 😁

- There's a script available in the repo for automatically upgrading QGIS
plugins/scripts to Qt 6 compatibility WITHOUT BREAKING compatibility with
older releases/qt5 based releases. It's here:
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/blob/master/scripts/pyqt5_to_pyqt6/pyqt5_to_pyqt6.py

- After running the script, you'll also need to add "supportsQt6=yes" to
your plugins metadata configuration. Otherwise the Qt6 builds will just
ignore your plugin and will refuse to load it. See eg
https://github.com/wonder-sk/qgis-first-aid-plugin/commit/3687be7d9e026c59c9b775caaf5ee18cf8639886

- You'll need to compile your own Qt 6 build. There's no nightlies or any
prepackaged versions available.

- There are still some known issues with enum handling, but please open bug
reports when you encounter these!

- The plugin manager is currently broken in the Qt6 builds. Use a Qt5 build
to enable plugins
🤣

Again, to reiterate, there's NO plans for moving to QGIS 4.0 on the
horizon. The plan is to allow plugins to add Qt6 support without breaking
any compatibility with Qt5/older releases, so that the effort required by
plugin authors is extremely minimal. And with any luck,
the pyqt5_to_pyqt6.py script will do 99% of the work for you. Qt 6 builds
of QGIS 3.x will become available at some stage in a "preview release"
capacity, and likely some platforms will move to Qt6 only releases when
necessary for that platform (eg MacOS, wayland only linux systems). Read
more about the plan at
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/issues/198

This work has ONLY been possible thanks to funding from qgis.org, ie it's
possible only because of the users and organisations sponsoring QGIS!

Nyall
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