[PyQt] Roadmap, Future Releases etc.

[Phil Thompson]

There are a few things going on in the Qt world at the moment which will impact PyQt so I thought it was worth outlining the plans for future releases of Riverbank packages.


SIP v4
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SIP v4.18 will be released soon. v4.18.x will be the last series of releases (ie. there will be no v4.19). This release is expected to support the generation of Python type hint stub files. However it's main purpose is to issue deprecation warnings for any feature used that isn't supported by SIP v5. SIP v4 will be supported for "some time" (at most a year) after the release of SIP v5.

SIP v5
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SIP v5 will be released when ready. It will not be radically different to SIP v4. All deprecated features will be removed. All internal knowledge of PyQt will be removed. It will be able to be installed from PyPi.

PyQt v4
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PyQt v4.12 will be released soon. As Qt v4 is no longer supported, v4.12.x will be the last series of releases. It will support both SIP v4 and SIP v5. It will be supprted for the forseeable future but new releases will be relatively infrequent.

PyQt v5
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PyQt v5.6 will be released soon - depending on the release of Qt v5.6. New features of Qt will be added to PyQt as usual. It will support both SIP v4 and SIP v5. It is possible that new features may depend on SIP v5, but it will still be possible to use SIP v4 with those features disabled. It is planned that the Windows binary installers will no longer include Qt itself. This has become possible because installers for Python and Qt should be available that have been built with compatible compilers. It may even be possible to replace the PyQt installers with downloads from PyPi.

QScintilla
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QScintilla will continue to track releases of Scintilla. It will support both SIP v4 and SIP v5. A future version will include a utility to convert Python type hint stub files to .api files.

PyQt Charts
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A GPL version will be released when the corresponding Qt version is released (expected to be Qt v5.6). Like the commercial version it will be packaged separately.

PyQt Data Visualisation
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A GPL version will be released when the corresponding Qt version is released (expected to be Qt v5.7). Like the commercial version it will be packaged separately.

PyQt Purchasing
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A GPL version will be released when the corresponding Qt version is released (expected to be Qt v5.7). Like the commercial version it will be packaged separately.

pyqtdeploy
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pyqtdeploy will continue to track the latest releases of related packages. Immediate development is likely to concentrate on making it easier to create an appropriate deployment environment.


Feedback and comments very welcome...

Phil