A couple of weeks ago, we took our first steps towards the Qt 5.6 release.

One of the most important achievements was to put our new CI (continuous integration) system into use. This system has been developed from the ground up over the last 8 months as a replacement for the older, Jenkins-based CI system that we have been using so far. The old system was suffering from a lot of problems, leading to very long turn-around times to get individual patches integrated into Qt. The new system is both more stable and significantly faster. It also simplifies adding new repositories to the CI system, and is a lot more flexible in handling multiple branches. This will help both our development work as well as our release process.

With the new CI system in production, we then created the 5.6 branch from our development code base. After some stabilization work on the code base, and adjustments to our new CI system, we now have a first set of source packages for Qt 5.6 available for you to try out and play around with. Apart from many bug fixes, there are a lot new features available in Qt 5.6. If you are interested in the details, please have a look at our 5.6 wiki page.

Our focus for the coming weeks will now be to create the Qt 5.6 beta that will also be distributed in the form of binary packages. Our goal is to create the binary packages directly from our CI system, and not as a separate step afterwards. This will significantly reduce the turn-around time for creating new packages, thus making is faster and easier to create release packages in the future.

As always, you can get the alpha packages from our download page or from your Qt Account. We would like to encourage everybody to check them out, play around with them and give us feedback in terms of bug reports.