Qt Contributor Summit 2018

About two weeks ago i attended Qt Contributor Summit 2018, i did so wearing my KDAB hat, but given that KDE software is based heavily on Qt I think I'll give a quick summary of the most important topic that was handled at the Summit: Qt 6

• Qt 6 is planned for a November 2020 release
• Qt 5 releases will continue with the current cadence as of now with 5.15 being the last release (and also LTS)
• The work branch for Qt 6 will be branched soon after Qt 5.12
• Qt 6 has to be easy to migrate from Qt 5
• Qt 6 will use C++17
• Everything to be removed in Qt 6 should be marked as deprecated in 5.15 (ideally sooner)
• What can be done in Qt 5 should be done to Qt 5
• Qt 6 should be a "boring" release user feature wise, mostly cleanup and preparing for the future
• Qt 6 should change things that break at compile time, those are easy to fix, silent runtime changes are scarier
• Qt 6 will not use qmake as build system
• The build system for Qt 6 is still not decided, but there's people working on a qbs build and noone working on any other alternative

On a community related note, Tero Kojo the Community Manager for The Qt Company is leaving and doesn't seem a replacement is on sight

Of course, note that these are all plans, and as such they may be outdated already since the last 10 days :D

Call for distros: Patch cups for better internationalization

If you're reading this and use cups to print (almost certainly you do if you're on Linux), you may want to contact your distribution and ask them to add this patch.

It adds translation support for a few keyword found in some printers PPD files. The CUPS upstream project has rejected with not much reason other than "PPD is old", without really taking into account it's really the only way you can get access to some advanced printer features (see comments in the same thread)

Anyhow they're free to not want that code upstream but i really think all distros should add it since it's very simple and improves the usability for some users.