Here are some thoughts shared by Lars on the Timeline for Qt 5 Beta and the Final release. We are now looking at the mid / end of August for a stable product with plenty of polish:
Hi everybody, While I think it's very important to get Qt 5.0 out of the door as soon as possible, we should not release it without first getting it's quality to a very high standard. I think it has become rather clear that the original timeline of releasing Qt 5.0 by mid June is not doable anymore. There's still a lot of work to be done. I'll mention the three big items I see that are currently blocking us: * Get binary packages/installers working I'd like to see daily binary snapshots of Qt 5 that people can test for Windows, Mac and Linux. These need to be available when we start beta testing. We need to get daily source packages that actually build on all platforms even earlier than that. * Finish the documentation modularization This is progressing nicely, and the basic infrastructure is now in place for it. Currently we have modularized docs for QtCore, QtXml and QtSql. Try it out yourself by cd'ing into qtbase/src/corelib and running 'make docs'. You will see that there are still quite some warnings produced by qdoc, and this is a place where everybody can help. Casper will help us here to finish the modularization in qtbase, but we will then have some more work to do to get all other modules that are part of Qt Essentials into the same shape. * Further improve our platform plugins on Win, Mac and Linux Qt Creator runs against Qt 5 on all platforms, but there certainly are still more than enough bugs and glitches in the implementations. This will require some more focus and time to get into a more polished state. Please start looking for regressions compared to Qt 4.x on these platforms and actively use our bug tracker to report them. Another good area for testing is trying to port existing Qt 4.x apps over to Qt 5. Let's try to consolidate feedback on how it went on the wiki and actual bugs found while porting in the bug tracker. Bug wise things currently aren't looking to bad and numbers are starting to go down, and we are also getting our auto tests in shape with a lot less disabled/insignificant tests than what we had a couple of weeks ago. To accommodate for that I propose that we now rather accept a delay in our release schedules and work towards a new timeline that I believe we can meet. I'd like to aim for having the first beta (with a hard API freeze) our by the contributor summit. Depending on the feedback we will then add a second beta beginning of August and aim for a final release sometime mid to end of August. In the meantime we can/should think about doing another alpha. Thiago proposed that one option here could be to simply release the first source package that works on all platforms as the second alpha. Like that we don't use any additional resources and time on creating that second alpha. Cheers, Lars
