Qt 4th edition, feature pack 7

(a.k.a., Qt 4.7)

Borrowing the term from our Symbian / S60 friends, who have stopped using this naming scheme already, I'd like to point out that the Qt 4.6 and master branches in our Gitoriuous repository have diverged.

What does this mean? Well, if you build master now, Qt will tell you that it's version 4.7.0, not 4.6.0. For example:

$ qmake -v

QMake version 2.01a

Using Qt version 4.7.0 in /home/tmacieir/obj/troll/qt-main/lib

$ moc -v

Qt Meta Object Compiler version 62 (Qt 4.7.0)

$ $QTDIR/lib/libQtCore.so

This is the QtCore library version 4.7.0

Copyright (C) 2009 Nokia Corporation and/or its subsidiary(-ies).

Contact: Nokia Corporation (qt-info@nokia.com)
Build key:           i386 linux g++-4 full-config

Installation prefix: /home/tmacieir/obj/troll/qt-main

Library path:        /home/tmacieir/obj/troll/qt-main/lib

Include path:        /home/tmacieir/obj/troll/qt-main/include

And if you're following Qt development using Git, it might be time to start tracking the 4.6 branch instead:

git branch 4.6 origin/4.6

git checkout 4.6

That's about it. We haven't started merging 4.7 features yet. We don't know yet when it will be released, nor much about what's going to be in it. (Ok, we have some opinions on date and content...)

And before anyone panicks, no, we're not adopting the naming scheme either. This was just to write a longer title than two letters, two digits and one punctuation :-)

We've managed to keep a very boring strict numbering scheme for Qt for years. I remember when we released Qt 4.4 and our Chief Troll was interviewed by a Norwegian newspaper. After he had listed the new features coming in, the reporter commented something like, "4.4? You should call that release 13 or something!"

Other products have had a more, erm... relaxed numbering:

• Windows: 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, NT 3.5, 95, NT 4, 98, 98 SE, 2000, ME, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008, 7
• Solaris: started as Unix 6, 7, III, IV, V, V R2, V R3, V R3.2, V R4; merging with SunOS: 4 BSD, 4.1 BSD, SunOS 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0; resulting in: Solaris 2.0, 2.5, 7, 8, 9, 10

What's your take on what Qt's sequence numbering should be? Give your reply how Qt past releases should be numbered and how we should go from here. Be creative!