Re: QT5.6 (Dec15) to be Long Term Support - implications for Sailfish?
 

Really?! So, for example, you could plug the Maemo toolchain into the Qt 5 SDK, and it would be able to build Maemo apps? (If so, it'd be nice to try and re-package the Maemo and Meego toolchains back into the Qt SDK...)

Re: QT5.6 (Dec15) to be Long Term Support - implications for Sailfish?
 

Can't tell for sure for Maemo which I never used. 3 months ago, I was cross compiling apps for Qt4.7 embedded on PowerPC with the same version of QtCreator I was using at home for Qt5.4 desktop. So it is quite flexible.
I don't use anymore Qt4.x toolchains, but don't see why it wouldn't still be supported (Creator only launches qmake/make, which stays the same for all versions).

In the end, I also use it a lot with embedded devices (DsPIC, STM32, SAM7, ...), and calling their compilers/flasher tools, from inside QtCreator. It is less polished than when doing pure Qt thing, but QtCreator is lights years ahead of MplabX or IAR IDEs, so it is good...

Re: QT5.6 (Dec15) to be Long Term Support - implications for Sailfish?
 

Its simple, updates can bring regressions and rather than simply thinking YOLO lets just roll it out and see what happens since Qt is the heart of our system seems like a pretty stupid move.

Also I already explained that the Jolla is limited hardware wise so workarounds and optimizations maybe needed to make Qt viable.

The irony is I thought Qt would be faster in general than Androids apps, yet I look at the Jolla browser and wonder.

I would indeed enjoy the new WebEngine. But the company has around 100 people and I assume there not all coders lol. I wonder if we could just update it manually.

Re: QT5.6 (Dec15) to be Long Term Support - implications for Sailfish?
 

Wow. Really? Google has invested an unbelievable amount of time and money into their browser (Chrome) to make it competitive with both IE and Firefox. Qt, on the other hand, has essentially no in-house web expertise. Web browsing is absolutely the last place I would expect a Qt-based system to be better than Android...

Re: QT5.6 (Dec15) to be Long Term Support - implications for Sailfish?
 

That's why they use the expertise of Google and the open source community and switched from QtWebKit to QtWebEngine based on Chromium and the Blink rendering engine.

Re: QT5.6 (Dec15) to be Long Term Support - implications for Sailfish?
 

Exactly! Gotta hope that they don't have to keep switching between backends all the time. :) But yeah, it takes some effort to migrate code from WebKit to WebEngine; here's a wiki from Qt on the subject:

https://wiki.qt.io/Porting_from_QtWebKit_to_QtWebEngine

Re: QT5.6 (Dec15) to be Long Term Support - implications for Sailfish?
 

What about Universal Components ? It of course would not look like Silica on other platforms but makes it possible to have a single UI codebase. :)

A nice example of UC usage is modRana, which has the same UI codebase for Sailfish OS (Silica backend), desktop Linux and Android (both use the QtQuick Controls backend).

Re: QT5.6 (Dec15) to be Long Term Support - implications for Sailfish?
 

You're right, but the "price" is paid at two different points. Waiting to upgrade means that the pain for that upgrade is delayed until someone decides to pay it (aside from the fairly insignificant cost of having to backport things that are required). It can grow so long as it isn't paid (like interest on a mortgage, say) but it's "tomorrow's problem".

Re: QT5.6 (Dec15) to be Long Term Support - implications for Sailfish?
 

Browsers are a hard thing to compare because you're really not comparing application frameworks, you're comparing engines. In the case of the Jolla browser, you're comparing a small Qt-based UI shim plus the Gecko rendering engine doing all of the work — a massively complicated, large codebase, against whatever else you're using.

Having used WebEngine in non-Jolla projects, I'm happy with it. It's a very nice tool, and I'd be very interested to see it in an experimental browser.

I'm not completely sure it would be able to replace the built in browser overnight, though: I don't have numbers, but WebEngine was quite resource-hungry.

You would be able to (independently from Sailfish) build your own copy of a newer Qt (including WebEngine) and use that to build your own application. I'm fairly sure that Silica's UI components wouldn't work though, as last time I looked, they had dependencies on internal APIs inside Qt (which have no backwards-compatibility promise, meaning they break from one release to another).

Re: QT5.6 (Dec15) to be Long Term Support - implications for Sailfish?
 

with a QT5.6 LTS coming in December I cannot see Jolla porting Sailfish to any other version such as 5.3 / 5.4 / 5.5 in the interim.

that said, i would not expect to see such a change made quickly, so perhaps we might see Sailfish 3.0 based on QT5.6 in December 2016...