Qt 6.0 is on its way, but it’s shaping up to be different than developers were expecting. Qt product manager Santtu Ahonen has taken to the company’s blog to let users know that in order to “focus on the essential key features”, the Qt team will limit the number of targets and omit some operating systems in the next major release.

Compared to earlier versions, Qt 6.0’s list of supported development hosts only includes 64bit Windows 10, macOS, Ubuntu, CentOS, SLES, and openSUSE. This means Qt is getting rid of Windows 7 and 8.x, won’t provide 32bit Windows support, and is dropping Apple watchOS and tvOS from the list of development targets. 

In addition, users won’t be able to create UWP applications on Windows 10 and will have to wait for a later version in the 6.x series to get their apps up on ARM based and embedded platforms. WebAssembly will join the target list again in Qt 6.1.

Qbs? Still alive and kicking

As Qt Company has decided to stop ploughing time and effort into Qbs, the build tool has been developed by an adjacent volunteer community that has now released version 1.17 into the wild. The 272 contribution spanning update contains improvements for bare-metal devices, Android App bundle creation, and initial Qt 6 support, amongst other things.

No surprises here: CNCF tech radar on observability sees open source on top

A second edition of the CNCF end user technology radar has been released and this time, the CNCF end user community took a long, hard look at observability. As in the first edition, members of the end user community were asked to let the editors know which products they had assessed, trialed, and adopted in their chosen field. The result is meant to give organisations that are new to the cloud native space some guidance of what to look into first.

In the case of observability (monitoring is perhaps a more apt word), Elastic, OpenMetrics, Datadog, Grafana, and Prometheus comprised the ‘adopt’ section of the radar, while Splunk, Sentry, CloudWatch, Lightstep, Statsd, and Jaeger were in the trial section. Thanos, Kiali, and OpenTelemetry are well-known, but a lack of consensus on projects meant they only made it into the assess category.

Results of the radar have to be taken with a pinch of salt, as there’s no way of knowing when an organisation first tried a tool it deemed unfit or if it has turned into a viable option in the meantime. The freeform approach to getting feedback also means the radar compares things that can’t necessarily be compared, such as standards (OpenMetrics) and tools (Prometheus). 

Companies that contribute are also inclined to go for open source products, given their engagement in the foundation, which is why one of the radar’s main findings, that “most commonly adopted tools are open source”, is not necessarily representative of the wider market. While Prometheus, for example, is a very useful tool, it also is one of the CNCF’s poster projects and so a wide usage among the user group members shouldn’t be a surprise. CloudWatch on the other hand is almost dismissed in the trial section, though anyone using AWS resources will have trouble finding a tool more suited to their needs: CloudWatch is Amazon’s standard for monitoring its services. 

HashiCorp introduces policy as code playgrounds

DevOps tool provider HashiCorp has come up with a way to teach its user base how to get going with its policy as code framework Sentinel. The now available Sentinel Playground gives ops personnel an option to either learn about policy implementation by playing around in a secure environment or prototyping functions and rules with mock data. Users more interested in secret management will be interested to learn that there’s now a supported HashiCorp Vault GitHub Action for easy integration into CI/CD workflows.

Red Hat’s alternative to Docker, rkt, and Co turns 1.19

Container runtime interface cri-o has been pushed out in version 1.19. The update comes with an API change regarding namespace lifecycle management, and features an option to put the version file in persistent storage, an indicator for containers running in privileged mode and a metrics exporter amongst other things.