Exactly one month ago, I blogged about three different Qt 4 releases in the space of two weeks, even though one was an alpha. Now, I’m happy to bring you to the Qt 4.4.0 Release Candidate, which you can readily download from our FTP servers and mirrors in the Open Source version, or from the commercial distribution server for our commercial licensees.
This is the last scheduled step before the final release. If all goes well, we’ll have the final packages out the door in more or less a month. In the mean time, our team will be resting and doing nothing…
Wait, no, just kidding. 
As the name says, this is a release that we consider to be of release quality. While we still have a few outstanding issues we want to fix before the release, this release is good enough to be used for most tasks. In special, we’re interested in knowing if anything is broken as compared to previous releases.
We’re doing our best to anticipate the ways our product could break, but we can’t catch all cases. And as proven by our own final sanity checks this morning, it’s getting more and more difficult to do it. And there comes a point when you can’t think of creative new ideas to do it (pasting 1 MB worth of junk into line edits, for instance).
Here’s where you, dear reader, comes in. Please download the RC1 and run your Qt4 application with it. If you see things not working like they used to, let us know.
I won’t be talking anymore of the cool new features of this release. I did that one month ago and I’ll let our Marketing Team take over now. Besides, there are no new features since the beta. In fact, there haven’t been any since the Technical Preview, which was when we entered Feature Freeze mode. But soon we will have Qt 4.5 development start and Labs will fill again with blogs from developers about the CoolNewStuff™they’ll be working on, as well as information from our roadmap.
Snapshots
Some people have already noticed that there are changes in the Qt snapshots. A couple of weeks ago, we started publishing snapshots of the Qt 4.5.x tree (mainline development, a.k.a. “trunk” for Subversion users). We’re publishing those snapshots in the so-called “minimal set”: only the Qt/Embedded Linux, Qt/Windows CE and the merged Qt/X11+Mac+Win (the misleadingly called “qt-all” package) packages are published daily.
Also, last week, the Qt 4.4.x tree snapshots changed version numbers to 4.4.1. What happened there was that the 4.4.0 release was branched off for final fixes, while other development continues in what will become Qt 4.4.1. Our development process calls for a branch before public releases so we can do some intensive testing without many changes going in and potentially invalidating previous test results.
11 Responses to “Qt 4.4 Release Candidate is out”
Hi,
i try build this RC on my MacOSX and on compilation process i have some issues with wrong generated files:
example in qt sources was generated file with name tabordereditor_plugin.h0000664
this postfix 0000664 on cpp or h suffix is on many files like:
tabordereditor_global.h0000664
tabordereditor_tool.cpp0000664
TransactionalRAMDirectory.cpp0000664
MultiFieldQueryParser.h0000664
and etc.
After rename this wrong suffix to correct suffix the compilation process is done.
So… what’s planned for 4.5? 
(besides switching to Cocoa on Macs)
Is there anywhere a list of which bugs have been fixed in 4.4.0-rc1, that were not fixed in 4.4.0-beta1? A list like that might help me know what sort of things to look for…
Qt Assistant crashes with “An unhandled win32 exception occurred in assistant.exe [3692]” when clicking on the small plus-icon to add a new tab.
Installed: qt-win-commercial-4.4.0-rc1-vs2005.exe
Guys, my blog is not a bug-reporting tool. Please report them by sending the information to qt-bugs@trolltech.com or posting to the qt4-preview-feedback@trolltech.com mailing list (the former is preferred).
@Donald: I’ve just checked the “all” and “mac” packages: there’s no 00000064 in the filenames anywhere. The tabordereditor_tool.cpp file appears just fine in all of them.
Hey
This release supports Visual Studio 2008 integration ?
Yes, VS2008 integration is supported. We also released VS2008 binaries for commercial customers.
@Thiago Macieira: sorry for reporting my issue in your blog .. you have right, this not place for reporting or feedback .. my mistake 
but only final for my issue is, of course, problem is’nt in sources of Qt but in faulty application The Unarchiver.app on MacOSX, wherewith have i unpack qt sources. After using tar from command line for unpack qt sources is all correct. Sorry again and thanks for your reaction which leads me to check it again.
Now that the source download (never mind the binary) of Qt is getting so big, surely Trolltech should start putting out runtime binaries of Qt on the Mac and Windows? Besides the bloat that shipping Qt libraries with Qt applications adds to the programs - particularly if they are small - it really makes no sense to have as many copies of Qt as there are Qt applications on a system. Also, copying Qt frameworks into an application bundle and name-tooling the executable and the libraries to point to the internal copy of the frameworks is a pain in the neck for Mac developers. Much as we do with the X11 versions on most Unix/Linux systems, we should be able to link to the libraries at a standard location, which on the Mac in particular should be the same place as the development binary installs (eg. /Developer/qt).
The 4.4.0-rc1 is 103Mb. That’s more than twice the size of 4.3.4. Is WebKit and Phonon that big? What’s accounts for this doubling? I also notice that the daily snapshot for 4.4.0 is only 51Mb. Huh?
@Matthew Smith: You can get runtime-only Qt binaries from the kde-windows project.