[PyQt] Heads Up for Next SIP Release

[Phil Thompson]

The next release of SIP (v4.19) has a lot of internal changes and requires all SIP based bindings to be recompiled. The reason for these changes is to minimise the dependencies between modules. For example, a new release of PyQt5 (containing a new class in QtCore) could break a QScintilla module even though QScintilla knows nor cares about the new class. This has always been a problem for maintainers of binary packages.

Once new wheels of everything have been released then, in the future, binary packages will be able to be released independently.

This has also been extended to Python itself. The new version of SIP can generate code that only used the limited Python API defined in PEP 384. This means that the same PyQt wheel will work with any version of Python starting with Python v3.4. Anything that is Python version dependent is handled by the sip module. Therefore in order to support Python v3.6 for all packages I just need to release wheels for SIP for v3.6.

Because of the number of changes I recommend people test with the current snapshots as much as possible. Although the development is complete I'm not going to make a release for some time to give people the chance to check it out.

Phil