We are happy to announce the first official release of Qt for Python (Pyside2).

As the version tag implies, it is based on Qt 5.11 and therefore the first release that supports the Qt 5 series. At large the project will follow the general Qt release schedule and versions. Although this is still a Technical Preview we will support the release with the usual support pattern (except the compatibility one). Unfortunately, earlier versions of Qt than 5.11 are not supported. It is available for open source and commercial Qt for Application Development users. Note that there is only one package for commercial and open source users. We hope we can receive plenty of feedback on what works and what does not. We want to patch early and often.

Eventually the aim is to release Qt for Python 5.12 without the Tech Preview flag.

The Qt for Python development

It's been a long journey for this release to come to this point. It started two years ago with this announcement from Lars. Since that day we had a fair share of ups and downs. As the first step, we had to sort out the license situation. We are very grateful for the support and agreements we got from the project contributors during this process.

First development (for our internal Qt for Python team) started based on Qt 5.6 and was mostly focused on stabilizing the code base. With the (at the time) upcoming Qt 5.7 release and it requiring C++11 support a major update was needed for Shiboken (our bindings generator). Similar to qdoc and QtCreator we walked down the path of deferring C++ parsing to clang. Another major construction yard was the documentation. As some might know, the documentation generation pipeline is much longer than Qt's. It required us to reanimate long lost or dead code in qdoc. Nevertheless we have not given up on being able to simplify this further down the road.

Earlier this year we started the generation of snapshots and we are very grateful for all the comments and bug reports we have received from early adopters in the community. Naturally we will continue to publish the snapshots. Another step on this journey has been a technical blog post series describing some of the possibilities of the project (in chronological order):

If you have not read those blogs yet I suggest you head there and get a first impression. The last milestone has been the adoption of the Python Stable ABI. It enables us to significantly reduce the number of packages as the same package can address all Python 3.5 and later versions.

Get Qt for Python

The release supports Python 2.7, 3.5 & 3.6 on the three main desktop platforms. The packages can be obtained from download.qt.io or using pip with

pip install \ --index-url=https://download.qt.io/official_releases/QtForPython/ pyside2

Eventually, we hope we can upload the packages to the Python Package Index (PyPi) under https://pypi.org/project/PySide2/. Unfortunately package size restrictions on PyPi could not be lifted in time for the release.

If you want to report a bug, please use the Qt for Python project on bugreports.qt.io. The team can be reached on Freenode #qt-pyside and regularly publishes its progress in the weekly meeting minutes.

Other interesting links: