QT abandoning open source LTS releases #18580

1. 
   jameshilliard commented at 11:40 pm on April 9, 2020: contributor

   Since we currently use QT LTS releases for building Bitcoin Core we may run into a problem as LTS releases are being dropped from the open source part of the QT project.

   There are also reports that QT may end up entirely abandoning open source for all QT releases less than 12 months old.

   Since it appears in both of these cases they will not be providing security fixes in a timely manner we may want to start planning how best to deal with these unfortunate changes.

   From my understanding the QT parts of Bitcoin Core have minimal attack surface due to how we use QT but I’m not entirely sure.

2. fanquake added the label GUI on Apr 9, 2020
3. 
   promag commented at 10:44 am on April 11, 2020: member

   We are making this change to encourage open-source users to quickly adopt new versions.

   This might be OK for the GUI since desktop users are probably also using most recent versions of their favourite OS. Only concern I can see is Qt pushing the minimum GUI requirements.

4. 
   MarcoFalke commented at 0:40 am on May 29, 2020: member

   I don’t think we have a choice. Now that they dropped LTS, all we can do is follow their latest open source release.
5. 
   MarcoFalke commented at 0:41 am on May 29, 2020: member

   Does anyone know how long the support for non-lts versions is? “Qt 5.15 is supported as usual for all our users” isn’t helpful. https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-5.15-released
6. 
   fanquake commented at 1:08 am on May 29, 2020: member

   Does anyone know how long the support for non-lts versions is?

   My understanding is that “standard support” is 1 year from release. So the currently supported versions of Qt seem to be:

   Version	Release Date	Supported Until
   5.9 (LTS)	31/5/2017	31/5/2020
   5.12 (LTS)	31/1/2019	5/12/2021
   5.13	19/6/2019	19/6/2020
   5.14	12/12/2029	12/12/2020
   5.15 (LTS Commercial license only)	26/5/2020	26/5/2023

   Annoyingly they have also stopped adding “Supported until” dates to their “Supported Platforms and Configurations” pages, like they did for 5.9. However I did find a presentation that seems to confirm the dates above:

7. 
   Sjors commented at 2:19 pm on June 19, 2020: member

   This could become an acute problem if they e.g. bump their minimum compiler version earlier than we’re willing to.
8. 
   hebasto commented at 8:25 am on October 3, 2021: member

   Should we keep this issue open?
9. 
   fanquake commented at 2:49 am on October 4, 2021: member

   I don’t think we need to. Not really anything we can do in regards to non LTS releases. If anyone wanted to discuss this further the gui repo is probably a better place anyways.
10. fanquake closed this on Oct 4, 2021

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11. DrahtBot locked this on Oct 30, 2022

Contributors
jameshilliard promag MarcoFalke fanquake Sjors hebasto

Labels
GUI