Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Qt availability changes

From: Graham Bloice <graham.bloice@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2020 20:36:40 +0000


On Mon, 27 Jan 2020 at 20:06, Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Qt Company recently announced upcoming changes in the distribution of their official binaries:

https://www.qt.io/blog/qt-offering-changes-2020
https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/development/2020-January/thread.html#38316

Two of the changes adversely affect how we develop and build Wireshark, primarily on Windows and macOS. First, downloading official releases from qt.io will require logging in with a Qt account. How much of an issue is this for people developing Wireshark on those platforms? Is it enough to warrant switching to a different, unofficial source for Qt binaries? I'm not really thrilled about the prospect of Qt salespeople pestering someone who just wants to build a Wireshark dissector.

Second, LTS releases will no longer be open source starting with Qt 5.15. We currently ship the latest LTS version of Qt with our Windows and macOS packages. I'm not sure how we're going to handle this in the future.

Uggh.  Really unhelpful.  I fail to see how requiring Open source projects to follow effectively the HEAD of the CURRENT release is going to make things better.

As folks noted in the thread you linked to, how will CI systems handle this?

--
Graham Bloice