Qt 5.6.2 on FreeBSD
Qt 5.6.2 was released today, the second patch release to the LTS (long-term support) Qt 5.6 release. Tobias had done prep-work by writing the FreeBSD ports for the last snapshot; I accidentally nuked that this morning, but now this afternoon I've restored Qt 5.6.2 final to the area51 unofficial ports tree. Since this is a patch-release, I'll PR it shortly and then we can expect it to end up in official FreeBSD ports shortly.
One little blurb from the release-blog:
Qt 5.6.2 is well suited for users that can not upgrade to a later version of Qt, for example due to dependency to C++98 compiler.
In our (FreeBSD) case, what's blocking is Qt 5.7 and WebEngine, which remains a big pain in the butt to get working at all (because its upstream doesn't care about all the platforms that Qt cares about, or that KDE cares about, or that I care about -- in decreasing size of audience, I think). How big a pain in the butt? Well, I've heard of efforts to update WebKit (not only in BSD-land, mind) and even efforts to port current KDE PIM back to an updated WebKit, thus dropping the WebEngine dependency introduced there. I imagine -- or hope -- that the pain in the butt of doing that is smaller than the pain of massaging WebEngine into shape. Basic economics -- reduction of pain in the butt. I have no idea what's happening there long-term. Suffice to say that for now, Qt 5.6 is where it's at on FreeBSD.
KDE Frameworks 5 is lined up for use; there's a big change in KDE ports infrastructure on FreeBSD going down, which will make it easier for us to keep KDE4 and KDE Frameworks, Plasma and Applications running side-by-side for now, and will help ease the porting maintainence burden. That big change has reached the last stage: an exp-run, which rebuilds everything on every version on every architecture. Once the fallout from that is cleared, KDE Frameworks 5.27 is ready for landing.