Qt 4.x EOL

laanwj commented at 2:08 pm on June 25, 2016: member

At some point we likely want to drop support for Qt4, to be able to use new Qt5 features without worrying about backwards compatibility.

Not sure when: there is no real hurry. Just wanted to have a issue open for this. This doesn’t have to be 0.14. Although the number of people still testing with Qt4 is likely very low.

The only article I could find on Qt’s EOL policy was: https://blog.qt.io/blog/2014/11/27/qt-4-8-x-support-to-be-extended-for-another-year/ which is pretty old.

laanwj added the label GUI on Jun 25, 2016

laanwj added this to the milestone Future on Jun 25, 2016

laanwj added the label Build system on Jun 25, 2016

luke-jr commented at 11:01 pm on June 25, 2016: member

IMO anything like this should wait for KDE 5 to be mostly viable as an upgrade for KDE 4. At least, last I checked, that is still a bit off (but coming up fast, maybe within a year).

laanwj commented at 2:32 pm on June 27, 2016: member

You can’t use Qt5 applications on KDE4?

luke-jr commented at 4:25 pm on June 27, 2016: member

Not without losing native platform integration, unfortunately. :(

laanwj commented at 8:16 am on June 28, 2016: member

Ok let’s wait for that then.

TheBlueMatt commented at 3:34 pm on October 31, 2016: member

See-also #9038. The PPA was forced to revert to Qt4.

laanwj commented at 8:12 am on March 29, 2017: member

See-also #9038. The PPA was forced to revert to Qt4.

As it is a Qt upstream issue w/ Unity that is hopefully solved by now, do you know if this issue still exists for newer Ubuntu?

da2ce7 commented at 2:28 pm on February 17, 2018: none

I think that post Bitcoin 0.16, dropping support for QT4 can be seriously reconsidered.

Sjors commented at 11:44 am on February 19, 2018: member

@luke-jr what’s the KDE situation these days?

luke-jr commented at 6:45 pm on February 19, 2018: member

KDE 4 is basically dead nowadays.

AFAIK the only reasons to keep Qt4 support are “because why not” and some PPA issue (unless that’s been resolved?).

TheBlueMatt commented at 6:47 pm on February 19, 2018: member

I’m not aware of any changes that would allow us to reconsider dropping Qt4 support. Ultimately we probably can’t do that until we drop the tray bar icon (which is probably a thing we should do anyway, its a pretty strange thing to have anymore, AFAIU).

flack commented at 10:57 pm on February 21, 2018: contributor

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I seem to have a number of tray icons from apps on all the OSes I use, and I never had any real issues with them. Is the problem specific to Unity and/or a particular version? I can’t quite make that out from the linked tickets

laanwj commented at 4:33 pm on February 22, 2018: member

Yes, it is specific to the interaction of unity and tray icons (which requires a plugin to work properly, which has been broken for a long time and will never be fixed). With any other window manager there should be no problem.

If that’s really the only thing holding this back, maybe we should add a configure option so that @TheBlueMatt can disable the tray icon for PPA builds. On older ones, as newer Ubuntu don’t use unity anymore.

laanwj removed this from the milestone Future on Feb 23, 2018

laanwj added this to the milestone 0.17.0 on Feb 23, 2018

laanwj commented at 5:01 pm on February 23, 2018: member

Tentatively moving this to 0.17.0, given that we can address @TheBlueMatt ’s issue in one way or another.

TheBlueMatt commented at 3:51 pm on March 2, 2018: member

Well we can at least deprecate it in 2021 when 16.04 LTS isnt supported anymore :/. Disabling functionality in the PPA seems like a super weird way to address this issue.

laanwj commented at 1:12 pm on March 20, 2018: member

That’s fine, whatever you want, but we’re not going to wait that long to deprecate Qt4, just because of a minor annoyance with a small detail in the GUI on some distros.

laanwj commented at 9:00 pm on April 12, 2018: member

From what I read in the quassel IRC channel, apparently Gentoo is going to drop Qt4 support very soon. Other distros will likely follow.

Sjors commented at 9:47 am on June 13, 2018: member

Given how few people are working on QT, not having to think about Qt4 would probably speed up UI development. It’s still a cause for confusion e.g. #12723 (comment)

I’d also prefer to kill it in 0.17 and deal with “minor annoyance with a small detail in the GUI on some distros” directly if someone can turn those into Github issues.

jonasschnelli commented at 9:54 am on June 13, 2018: contributor

I’m in favour of dropping Qt4 support completely (for 0.17). It may restrict the possible OS set. The try icon issue (https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/9038) seems to be fixed.

Since this obviously only affects the GUI part (and not bitcoind), I think limiting (very little to none in future) the possible OSes seems acceptable.

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Qt 4.x EOL #8263