mbuesch
Qt6 support?
Qt5 is declared deprecated in Gentoo
At this point in time, Linux distributions are starting to track which packages are blocking a future Qt5 cleanup. Real Qt Company OSS support stopped back in 2020, when public availability of LTS releases started to be delayed for 1 year, stable branch repository access got closed down (with 5.15 branch repository receiving any new LTS tag one year after commercial release) and only Qt6-relevant bugs are being fixed (then backported) since then. The final release happened on 2025-05-19, which means a) we will not get it until 2026-06-19, b) any bugs discovered since last May will not be fixed and c) no bugs since 2020-12-08 that haven't also been affecting Qt6 were fixed at all.
At least Gentoo, Alpine and Ubuntu are entertaining Qt6 porting trackers by now, for Gentoo, Qt5 revdep cleanups are in full swing already. https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=qt5-removal https://gitlab.alpinelinux.org/alpine/aports/-/issues/17114 https://ubuntu-archive-team.ubuntu.com/transitions/html/qt5-removal.html
The good news is that the porting effort to Qt6 is supposed to be much smaller than from Qt4 to Qt5. Links: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/portingguide.html https://www.qt.io/blog/references-and-hints-about-porting-from-qt5-to-qt6 https://www.qt.io/blog/porting-from-qt-5-to-qt-6-using-qt5compat-library
Thanks for your question.
Yes, Qt6 porting is needed, Absolutely.
Please feel free to help the project and create a Pull Request.
Note that Qt6 porting is a bit tricky for Python programs, because they renamed quite a few enums. So it has to be ensured that all code paths are thoroughly tested.
[to anyone reading this] Please don't wait for me for that though. As the last person taking care of Qt5 (and trying to get rid of it) in Gentoo, I can only give upstreams a chance to react before packages are facing repository cleanups.