Digia, Qt Commercial is actively working on releasing Qt Commercial 4.7.5. The planned release date for this continuation to the 4.7 series is planned for December 2011. The release will contain new fixes done by Digia as well as existing fixes in the Qt 4.7 branch not included to 4.7.4.
With quite much of the development focus already placed on 4.8, Digia still wants to extend the lifetime of the 4.7.x series for those customers who do not wish to move to 4.8 yet. In our customer survey, many Qt Commercial customers indicated that they prefer stability and maturity over new features. To better serve these customers, Digia will develop 4.7.5.
There are some good fixes already available in the Qt 4.7 branch, which are planned to be included in the new release. At the moment, there exists 74 fixes in the 4.7 branch, which have not yet been included in any release. 59 of those fixes are directly benefiting desktop and embedded platforms. We expect to be able to capture the majority of these fixes in addition to the new fixes Digia has done for the 4.8 branch. With the detailed amount of fixes not yet frozen, we estimate 4.7.5 to have over 100 fixes compared to 4.7.4.
We are planning to bring Windows Embedded Compact 7 and Standard 7 support into 4.8 to replace the WinCE 5 and 6 as primary platforms. So for all those users actively developing for WinCE 5 and 6 the 4.7.5 is an important release.
In addition to the Qt Commercial customers, there may be some community projects that will also benefit from the extended lifeline of the 4.7 series. Nokia has announced that they will no longer develop any more releases to the 4.7 series (http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/09/01/qt-4-7-4-released/). We are working with Nokia to agree on the best way to provide the 4.7.5 release to opensource Qt users.
