qt6 availability in repos
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I'm deciding whether to build my app against qt5 or qt6. It seems that lots of potential users are on older Linux OS (CentOS/Debian/Ubuntu). Since this would be an open source open, users would have to install the Qt6 library binaries, but I've read comments that Qt6 is only available (precompiled) on very recent OS's.
I would like to switch to Qt6, but I checked the CentOS8 / Almalinux8 repos and Qt6 is not available. How would CentOS/RH8 users install the Qt6 libraries? (The qt6 page says CentOS8 is compatible)
I also see Ubuntu 20+, and debian 11+ listed as well. Does that mean Qt6 libraries are available precompiled in the base libraries for these OS's? What about earlier versions of Ubuntu/Debian?
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I'm deciding whether to build my app against qt5 or qt6. It seems that lots of potential users are on older Linux OS (CentOS/Debian/Ubuntu). Since this would be an open source open, users would have to install the Qt6 library binaries, but I've read comments that Qt6 is only available (precompiled) on very recent OS's.
I would like to switch to Qt6, but I checked the CentOS8 / Almalinux8 repos and Qt6 is not available. How would CentOS/RH8 users install the Qt6 libraries? (The qt6 page says CentOS8 is compatible)
I also see Ubuntu 20+, and debian 11+ listed as well. Does that mean Qt6 libraries are available precompiled in the base libraries for these OS's? What about earlier versions of Ubuntu/Debian?
@ocgltd said in qt6 availability in repos:
I'm deciding whether to build my app against qt5 or qt6.
Another option (with its own drawbacks of course) is to make your code compatible with both Qt5 and Qt6. Of course, the effort required depends on what Qt modules you need to use, and how much they've changed between releases.
Just as an example, this open-source project of mine currently builds and test on 88 different combinations of Qt versions 5.9 to 5.15, and 6.2 to 6.5, on Linux, macOS and Windows, with gcc, clang, mingw and MSVC. Is it overkill? Yeah, it is a bit. But it does catch some very interesting corner-case bugs :) Try searching that repo for
QT_VERSION_CHECKto get some sense of how easy/hard it might be to support multiple Qt versions.(Side note: the reason that project doesn't build for Qt 6.0 to 6.2, is it uses the QtBluetooth module, which wasn't ported to Qt6 until 6.3).
Anyway, just showing that is doesn't necessarily have to be an either/or choice, but you might be able to support both Qt5 and Qt6 on a single codebase. Of course, there's also a lot of advantages in settling on just one version... it just depends on which of your needs weigh the heaviest.
Cheers.
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@ocgltd said in qt6 availability in repos:
I'm deciding whether to build my app against qt5 or qt6.
Another option (with its own drawbacks of course) is to make your code compatible with both Qt5 and Qt6. Of course, the effort required depends on what Qt modules you need to use, and how much they've changed between releases.
Just as an example, this open-source project of mine currently builds and test on 88 different combinations of Qt versions 5.9 to 5.15, and 6.2 to 6.5, on Linux, macOS and Windows, with gcc, clang, mingw and MSVC. Is it overkill? Yeah, it is a bit. But it does catch some very interesting corner-case bugs :) Try searching that repo for
QT_VERSION_CHECKto get some sense of how easy/hard it might be to support multiple Qt versions.(Side note: the reason that project doesn't build for Qt 6.0 to 6.2, is it uses the QtBluetooth module, which wasn't ported to Qt6 until 6.3).
Anyway, just showing that is doesn't necessarily have to be an either/or choice, but you might be able to support both Qt5 and Qt6 on a single codebase. Of course, there's also a lot of advantages in settling on just one version... it just depends on which of your needs weigh the heaviest.
Cheers.
