Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: [Wireshark-dev] When to drop Qt 4 support and require Qt 5?

[Peter Wu <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

Qt 4.8 has not been supported for two years now ("standard support"
ended in December 2015,
https://blog.qt.io/blog/2015/05/26/qt-4-8-7-released/). Is it feasible
to drop support for Qt 4 and require Qt 5?

The development branch has apparently been broken for a while, I tried
to patch it up here: https://code.wireshark.org/review/25469

Reasons not to drop Qt 4.8 support:

 - RHEL/CentOS 6 by default do not have Qt 5, see
   https://wiki.wireshark.org/Development/Support_library_version_tracking#RHEL.2FCentOS

Reasons to drop Qt 4.8 support:

 - Reduce maintenance overhead (allow use of new Qt 5 features, use new
   signal/slot syntax, ...).
 - Related to the above, dropping Qt 4 would enable simplification:
   https://www.wireshark.org/lists/wireshark-dev/201712/msg00045.html
 - Upstream support has ended in December 2015.
 - We do not test it (not even compile testing), so bugs will sneak in.
 - macOS and Windows already require Qt 5.

It is probably too late for 2.6, but can we commit to this for the next
version? Or can we already declare Qt 4 unsupported now?
-- 
Kind regards,
Peter Wu
https://lekensteyn.nl