Hi,
with Qt 6 approaching it is time to have a look at our set of supported
platforms.
One candidate for removal of support was Windows 7. Some considerations
about dropping this support have been communicated on Qt's development
mailing list in March last year [1] and there were some discussions
about this topic on the corresponding bug report [2]
The operating system was initially launched in 2009 and reached its
official end of life in January 2020. That means that Microsoft no
longer provides security updates and instances running Windows 7 should
be replaced as soon as possible.
With this official Microsoft standing in mind our current plan is to
remove support for Windows 7 in Qt 6.0 onwards. Qt 6.0 release is
planned towards the end of 2020, roughly one year after Windows 7’s end
of life.
Of course, we do not make decisions like this easily or to upset our
users but there are clear advantages that speak in favor of dropping
support:
- We can rely on Windows functions being available instead of
trying to dynamically load libraries which might or might not be available.
- We can use functionality that only became available in later
Windows versions unconditionally. One example of this can be UWP APIs
which are Microsoft's "new way of writing APIs". Our new graphics
abstraction (RHI) can also rely on newer features being available on
Windows
- We can focus our Windows resources on bug fixes and new
functionality instead of maintaining this "legacy" operating system
- CI resources that are used for Windows 7 tests can be used to
test other configurations
Br, Olli
[1]
https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2019-March/035532.html
[2] https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-74687
_______________________________________________
Interest mailing list
Interest@qt-project.org
https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/interest
