Qt 4.6.0 Tech Preview 1

Today we have reached another significant milestone in Qt's life - 4.6.0-tp1 has been released. This is the first step in the process of turning all of the great new Qt features you've been reading about on Labs into a coherent, stable and polished product that will power a new generation of applications.

It's an exciting time to be the Qt Release Manager. Qt 4.6 is the first feature release that I've been involved in from the very start. And Qt 4.6 is a big release - there's a lot of new stuff and making all of that play nicely with all of the existing stuff is a big challenge. Luckily we enjoy a challenge here at Qt Developer Frameworks.

You can get the packages from the Qt website here, or from our ftp site: tar.gz version or zip version. You can also find the latest documentation at http://qt.nokia.com/doc/4.6-snapshot/index.html. (For those interested, the packages were generated from SHA1 c4c9b4457f0f760c1bf46dd8a309ab76eb128c1d in the qt.git source repository.)

Our main reason for providing this Tech Preview release is to solicit constructive feedback from the community of users and developers. The Tech Preview will contain bugs - with the amount of new code that has gone into Qt 4.6 that is unavoidable. Now that all the new 4.6 features are in the code, we are at the beginning of an intensive bug-fixing period that will likely last a few months.

At the end of that period we hope to release the most feature-rich and high-quality Qt ever, but to do that we need your help. There are two ways you can help: if you found a bug, you can submit a fix or an autotest that demonstrates the bug via the public qt-repository on http://qt.gitorious.org. Alternatively, if you have any bug reports or suggestions, whether they relate to the code, the documentation, or something else Qt-related, just follow the instructions for submitting feedback.

I won't go into detail about the new features that are making their debut in Qt 4.6 (there's already plenty of information about them on Labs, directly from the developers), but I would like to highlight a couple of important changes to Qt's packaging and supported platforms.

Previously, we have delivered source packages for each of our major supported platforms (Windows, MacOS X, X11, embedded-linux, embedded-wince, and an "all" package that included the code for all of the desktop platforms). Beginning with 4.6.0, we are delivering a single source package that contains the code for all platforms (there are .tar.gz and .zip versions of the file, but the contents are identical). This should remove any confusion about which package is the right one to download, not to mention making the Release Manager's life a little easier.

On the supported platforms: In Qt 4.6, QtScript is not enabled by default on platforms for which QtWebKit is not supported. However it does compile
on them and you can re-enable it by passing the "-script" option to configure.

That's all for now. We hope that Qt 4.6 provides something new, interesting and useful for all of you.