Qt4 and Bullseye

[Gary L. Roach]

Hi all,

I am using Bullseye (testing) because some of the software I use need
some of the newer libraries. Unfortunately Bullseye no longer includes
the Qt4 libraries and some of my packages still need Qt4. How can I get
Qt4 packages for Bullseye. There is probably a backport for this but I
have not used backport in the past. I will need a step by step procedure
if backporting is needed.

Any questions about why Qt4 is missing in Bullseye can be answered by
accessing Debian Bug report logs - #939626. <mailto:***@bugs.debian.org>

Any help will be sincerely appreciated.

Gary R

[Sven Hartge]

Post by Gary L. Roach
I am using Bullseye (testing) because some of the software I use need
some of the newer libraries. Unfortunately Bullseye no longer includes
the Qt4 libraries and some of my packages still need Qt4. How can I
get Qt4 packages for Bullseye. There is probably a backport for this
but I have not used backport in the past. I will need a step by step
procedure if backporting is needed.

Since Qt4 has been removed from all future releases there will be no
such thing as a backport in this case, because there is nothing to
backport *from*. (It would be a forward-port, but there is no such thing
for Debian.)

But you normally can just install the old library DEBs, for example by
getting them from snapshot.debian.org. You won't get any security or
other support for them.

Or you can create a chroot from an older Debian release still containing
Qt4 to run the old software. Unless the kernel changes in an
incompatible way, this should work for some time.

Grüße,
Sven.

[David Christensen]

Post by Gary L. Roach
Hi all,
I am using Bullseye (testing) because some of the software I use need
some of the newer libraries. Unfortunately Bullseye no longer includes
the Qt4 libraries and some of my packages still need Qt4. How can I get
Qt4 packages for Bullseye. There is probably a backport for this but I
have not used backport in the past. I will need a step by step procedure
if backporting is needed.
Any questions about why Qt4 is missing in Bullseye can be answered by
Any help will be sincerely appreciated.
Gary R

AIUI "backports" is newer code running on older Debian. You need the
opposite -- older code running on newer Debian.


Apparently, Qt4 is obsolete, Qt4 is no longer supported by its authors,
and the Debian project has dropped Qt4 and Qt4 applications as of Debian
10. I presume Qt5 and Qt5 applications are supported by Debian 10.


Have you tried contacting the Qt4 application vendors/ projects to see
if they are porting their applications to Qt5?


In the mean time, one possibility would be to build a virtual machine
with an older version of Debian that supports Qt4 (e.g. Debian 9),
install Qt4, and install your Qt4 applications.


David

[Nate Bargmann]

In the mean time, one possibility would be to build a virtual machine with
an older version of Debian that supports Qt4 (e.g. Debian 9), install Qt4,
and install your Qt4 applications.

That is what I would suggest as well. Preferably Qemu since VirtualBox
is no longer officially supported in Stable or Testing any more. I have
found another Debian running in Qemu to be about as fast as on bare
metal and much faster than the same Debian version running in VirtualBox
even with all of their special modules. Qemu does lack the ease of
mounting shared directories but I find SSHFS to be an excellent
substitute.

- Nate