Qt 4.6 on Mac OS 10.6

Mac OS X Snow Leopard was released on friday, Qt 4.6 is on its way - The 4.6 branch has been created at gitorious.org. What's new?

First of all we're rolling the OS Support window: support for 10.3 Panther has been removed and support for 10.6 Snow Leopard has been added. This means that Qt 4.6 on Mac OS X will support three versions of the operating system(10.4 - 10.6), four different architectures (ppc/ppc64/i386/x86_64) and two toolkits (Carbon/Cocoa). About half of the OS/arch/toolkit combinations are valid, see developing-on-mac.html for all the details.

Removing 10.3 (Panther) support
With Qt 4.5 we removed support for gcc 3.3, making Qt deploy-only on Panther. We're now removing run-time support as well. This allows us to remove a bit of code (Qt 4.5 contains around 60 10.3-spesific code paths), and also frees up developer, support and QA resources to focus on the newer platforms. In addition, our 10.3 testing machine here at the Oslo office is showing its age and is ready for retirement.

Adding 10.6 (Snow Leopard) support
From a developer viewpoint the biggest change in this release is more 64-bitness. Most(all?) of the bundled apps are 64-bit, and the gcc compiler produces x86_64 binaries by default. Qt follows suit and is also 64-bit by default when building for Cocoa (Select this with the -cocoa flag at the configure line or use the -arch x86_64 flag). Apple has also updated to gcc 4.2, which renders the macx-g++42 mkspec obsolete. Compiling for ppc64 is no longer supported by the gcc tool chain. Other than that developing on 10.6 is much the same, and we can all enjoy the new Exchange support in Mail.

Planning Ahead

Maintaining two ports is not sustainable in the long run, so the Carbon port is eventually going to be dropped. It is however our only means of supporting Tiger and legacy Qt3-based code, which suggests that we should keep it around for at least little bit longer. PPC support is not a big issue, the build infrastructure for it is there and the PPC-only bugs are few and far between. That being said, at some point in the future we'll probably end up supporting x86_64/Cocoa only. Unless something new we can port to appears in the mean time :)

So, here's the conclusion with a tentative plan:

  • this release (4.6) - Drop 10.3 support, add 10.6 support. Qt/Cocoa is 64-bit by default when compiling 10.6.
  • next release - The Cocoa port becomes the default for the Qt source and binary packages
  • next +1 release - Drop Carbon, 10.4 (Tiger) support and Qt3Support.

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