I said it before, and before. I hope you know the chant by now: Qt 4.4.2 is now released.
It’s almost weird to release 4.4.2, for two reasons: first, we’re so deep into Qt 4.5 work that it seems like the past when we go to 4.4 again. And second, because this release went smoothly, unlike 4.4.0 (really, really big release) and 4.4.1 (Summer got in the way).
I have to tell you, though: this is the last Qt release that Trolltech ASA will do…
…because the next one will be released by Nokia 
One week ago, an email was sent to all Trolltech ASA and Trolltech Inc. (commercial) clients giving them an update on the Nokia acquisition process. Among other things in legalese, it contained:
[…] Any existing agreements between you and Trolltech ASA will be assigned to Nokia Corporation under the same terms and conditions as are contained in the Agreements between you and Trolltech ASA. The assignment of all Agreements shall be effective September 27, 2008.
So, when we next release Qt, instead of seeing “Copyright (C) 1992-2008 Trolltech ASA”, you’ll see “Copyright (C) 1992-2008 Nokia Corporation”
That’s about it. And you thought I was going to drop a bomb, didn’t you? I mean, my last three blogs were rather bombastic… Sorry to disappoint you: we’re not evil and nor will we let ourselves become evil. We continue to work just as we have always done and we will continue to release Qt, again just as we have done before.
And we reserve the right to change things for the better.
20 Responses to “Repeat after me: the release is not out until I blog about it”
The release is not out until I blog about it
Aside from that: when will qt-copy be updated, will it at all?
Repeat after me: the release is not out until I blog about it
Posted by Thiago Macieira on Thursday, September 18, 2008 @ 18:06
SVN commit 862373
Date: 2008-09-18 18:09:21
4.4.2 update
Two things:
I’ve heard things about the “proper animation framework” - when can I play with it, and until then, when can I read about it?
Can you change the layout of this page, so this text area doesn’t come at the bottom of the page’s right column?
The guys working at animation blog and go to conferences. You can read their comments in those sites.
Sorry, but I don’t have any links for you. Maybe soon here.
(I also don’t have any web skills)
I’m also curious about this mysterious animation API but have never been able to find any details about it at all. 
Regarding 4.4.2 and 4.5, I’m curious how far off 4.5 is. Are we talking weeks or months, or worse (think 2009). If 4.5 is coming out next week maybe I’ll skip 4.4.2 entirely.
Now if only if tracker #210200 could finally be fixed.
Congrats and thank you for a new release. BTW, does this animation API have something to do with QEdje?
@Will, erm… just because Thiago said anything after September 27th will be Nokia stuff, you should not conclude that Qt 4.5 will be out next week Looking at previous release intervals, I guess you would have to wait some months, which is good, because the new stuff in Qt 4.4 still has to be explored by developers and polished (e.g. in its current “form”, QFormLayout isn’t of much use). Give developers time to find more bugs so that Qt 4.5 will be to Qt 4.4 what Qt 4.3 was to Qt 4.2!
Considering the agreement transfer, it looks like Nokia plans to slowly faze TT out.
Also, does the KDE Free Qt Agreement also transfer?
That same email mentions a repackage. I asked sales@trolltech.com about it (twice) and never got a reply
Perhaps you could blog about that too?
@Will: Hmm… apparently this Animation stuff is causing quite a stir. We’ll see when we can publish something.
We usually don’t publish our release dates. We reserve the right to shift them as necessary to meet our quality requirements. But you can tell from our past performance that the release cycle is around 8-11 months, which would put the 4.5 release between January and April next year. Also, we haven’t released a Technical Preview or Beta yet…
@Tsiolkovsky: interestingly, 4 of QEdje’s developers are here in the office in Oslo helping us polish the Animation API and help us by giving their experience on the subject. The objective is, of course, to make the code and the API better yet!
@Correa: Yes, there will be a repackaging. But I think that requires more than just a blog… something in the homepage instead. The marketing and webteams are on it.
Before adding new features, I wish one of the goal of version 4.5 would be to empty the task tracker from any bug issue 
How has Nokia effected the price of QT, which was always very expensive. Qt is a great great product, but the price for a commercial license is just to expensive for most companies to even consider. Will new Nokia releases of Qt be cheaper, or more expensive ?
@Michael: I’m not a Troll, nor a lawyer, but it seems to me that the KDE Free Qt Agreement will need some paperwork in order to transfer, according to the text of the current agreement. Section 5, in particular, says Trolltech can’t transfer copyright of Qt to any third party (in this case, Nokia) if that transfer would prevent Trolltech from fulfilling its obligations under the agreement (and ceasing to exist would definitely qualify as being unable to fulfill obligations!) unless the third party agrees to be bound by the terms of the agreement and signs an updated dicument.
I’m confident this legal nitpick has either been taken care of already or will be taken care of soon.
@Philippe: That will never happen. I can’t be more direct than that.
We spent about a month fixing issues reported and not reported before Qt 4.4.0 was out (before RC I think). And if we had another month, we would have found work to do. My point is: there’s no shortage of tasks to do. And we’ll never empty out the remaining tasks because you users will always report more (and it’s always at a larger rate than we can close)
The harsh truth is that we don’t have nearly enough resources to do what we set out to do, much less all tasks. So we apply this old principle of “prioritisation:” we weigh the severity of the tasks reported against the features that we want to research. And then we try to find a balance: the overall quality of the product increases and we add the features that the users and the market need.
Globaly, I am very satisfied with the reliability of Qt (and Qt in general). But like in any software, the more you add complexity and features to Qt, the more you have to take care about keeping bugs under control. The reliability of a software participates to its success as much as its “great number of features”.
Independantly from this bug issue, I wish a little more pragmatism from your side about the choice of new features, and for this, you should certainly double check the suggestions emitted by Qt users. Just an example to illustrate this: among the thousands of great Qt functions, there is no API to modify the date/time of a file. A minor, but very basic function, in my eyes…
Yes, I think the new animation stuff, if done correctly, is will be huge. I am currently learning Adobe AIR on the side because, well it is the leader in what I want to do, but I’d much rather be using Qt. I learned that AIR is nothing more than webkit (hrm, doesn’t Qt use Webkit?) and Java/Action Script (hrm, doesn’t Qt have JavaScript?), database, local file access, XML, (Qt: got it, got it, got it!) The only real missing points for Qt are the raster ops and an easy-to-use animation timeline. Some of the hassles I ran into is lack of 3D transforms, can’t animate opacity, blur, etc… While it is all accomplishable in some way, I ended up writing a lot of code. I’d hope that Zack or someone could come up with a simple animation tool that is like Flash, with the “stage” and key frames and “tweens”. Finally, Qt ease curves lack bounce, which actually use values of > 1.0 when bounce-easing to 1.0. (There is a lot of Qt code that clips to 1.0. - i.e “bounce on horizontal position requires and extent of 1.08, 1.04, before settling at 1.0)
The other thing on my wish list is SOAP. While there is a client for SOAP 1.1 in QtSolutions, really, Qt would be made awesome to the 10th Degree if we could use signals and slots to remote objects (objects reachable over http). Of course, taking this idea to completion would require that moc could also generate WSDL for Qt classes, and take WDSL and generate C++ proxies for remote SOAP calls. (TT# 110039)
@Philippe: I disagree with you when you say we don’t take users’ suggestions into account. We do.
@philippe perhaps you forgot to connect() your suggestion to the Trolltech SLOT(acceptSuggestion(QString)) ?
Commercial customers can also vote on bugs at task tracker.