asked 2014-12-10 13:05:25 +0200
As I read, there were difficulties with porting to Qt 5.2. On other news I read that Qt 5.4 has been released today.
Why is Jolla behind, e.g. didn't yet port to Qt 5.3? - I ask because I don't know the Qt ecosystem. Are there such big differences between these versions? Does Jolla deliberately stay some versions behind to keep the phone more stable?
Thanks for 'enlightenment'.
answered 2014-12-10 13:31:39 +0200
Because crashes bugs and other problems that affect a newly released piece of software are not acceptable on production phones.
Rolling release distros if this is what you have in mind don't have the QA that goes into a phone.
answered 2014-12-10 15:33:23 +0200
Moving to 5.3 was asked earlier on the SailfishOS mailing list. Jolla employees gave interesting answers on their reasons not to switch immediately : https://lists.sailfishos.org/pipermail/devel/2014-June/004595.html
If I can summarise them here, they began to switch to a newer Qt (5.2) some time ago when 5.3 was not available. They did it because they wanted some of the new features and because they don't want to stay locked on a version that will become older and older and unmaintained. It was a huge amount of work to tackle regressions introduced by this new version. Then 5.3 appeared but they choose to capitalise on their work on 5.2 before redo all regression checks again with 5.3. Thus the current switch to 5.2 and not to a more recent version.
@ Could you accept this answer and close the topic ? :-)
anandrkris ( 2014-12-10 17:28:09 +0200 )editYou are right, of course, changing one big and important library means a lot of regression testing. Still, eventually we will need the features of the newer libraries. For example Qt 5.4 brings (some sort of) high resolution display support and BTLE support, which may be nice to have, the former would be especially useful on the Jolla tablet. So I expect we eventually will get updates; I do not hurry too much, 5.2 is nice already.
mikelima ( 2014-12-10 19:39:06 +0200 )editanswered 2014-12-10 14:16:23 +0200
Living on the so-called "bleeding edge" is not something a Vendor (be it SW or HW) usually does; it is too risky due to nr of open issues (which usually are yet-to-be-discovered at the time of release). No SW is perfect ! :)
answered 2014-12-10 14:46:54 +0200
As a company you have always to think about introducing new SW - is there a need to do so or is the hardware compatible and what is the benefit you get from introducing furthermore you have a limited amount of employees, so if everybody has to port their Software to for example Qt5.2 they don't have anymore manpower to develop new features or debugging their software. I don't know the new features of Qt 5.3 or 5.4 but I think it's a bit like running an operation system like windows 7, if you don't need the new features of windows 8 or the hardware is not compatible you will not update because you have also to reinstall all of your programs. And otherwise I'm with @turtoisedoc that it's not good for a company to join an early maybe unstable version because all costumers will complain...
Asked: 2014-12-10 13:05:25 +0200
Seen: 1,357 times
Last updated: Dec 10 '14
