[PyQt] PyQt5 roadmap-guesstimate?

[Phil Thompson]

On Mon, 07 Jan 2013 18:05:48 +0700, Sebastian Sauer <mail at dipe.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> reading the backlogs and all I was able to find related to support for 
> PyQt at Qt5 its great to see that PyQt4 does support Qt5 already. Fantastic

> work as usual Phil!
> 
> My question is direct related to PyQt5, so not PyQt4. I read that the 
> plan is to replace QString/QVariant with Python objects but beside that 
> there are not much informations around related to PyQt5.
> 
> So, is there any guesstimate or maybe even a roadmap when we can expect 
> to see PyQt5? Also I wonder if now that PyQt4 does proper support Qt4 
> and Qt5 has PyQt5 any priority? Is it supposed to replace PyQt4 let's 
> say next n years or will PyQt4 live on during Qt5 lifetime (I think yes,

> but cannot harm to ask I think :) ).
> 
> Thanks in advance and keep up the great work!

The priority for PyQt5 is certainly lower than it was originally because
of the amount of stuff that was removed from Qt5. In other words, Qt v5.0
doesn't offer much over Qt4. That will change once Digia sort out their
resourcing of what was originally planned for Qt5, presumably starting with
Qt v5.1.

Adding Qt5 support to PyQt4 was a lot of work, but it will all be re-used
in PyQt5. The main remaining work to do for PyQt5 is to change the build
system. There are two drivers for this...

- SIP5 will not include a build system so PyQt will need a self-contained
build system

- to support cross-compilation (for Raspberry Pi and, eventually, Android
and iOS).

...and the always problematic documentation.

I don't plan on dropping support for PyQt4 - lots of people will want to
take advantage of bug fixes in Qt5, and its support for additional devices,
without porting from PyQt4 to PyQt5.

At this stage I'm not going to give any dates, but most of the work for an
initial PyQt5 release has already been done.

Phil