Qt support

Hi,

I am pretty new to the fdroid project, so in case anything below here has already been discussed, please just redirect me to the appropriate discussions.

I am a big fan of the froid project since a while now, and finally want to contribute to the project by publishing some apps of mine to the fdroid store. As far as I've seen, the Qt package was recently removed from the buildserver, as the installed version was outdated and contained a few security issues.

Are there any plans to add Qt support again or is there some other preferred way of building Qt apps within the frdoid infrastructure? I think the only option for now is to manually build Qt from source every time it is needed. Is that correct?

From a developers & maintainers point of view, I would really be in favor of a dockerized build. But I am not sure, whether that's technically possible nor if it aligns with your policies (only sourcecode, no binaries,...etc). With the current approach of building Qt first, I see the following disadvantages:

• Qt has a lot of dependencies + takes quite long to build from source
• Qt constantly adds features (and sometimes breaks backwards compatibility). So, in order to keep up, one has to maintain several build scripts to build all the different versions of Qt. (e.q: I have 4 Qt apps, which require three different Qt versions; Qt 5.9.x to Qt 5.12.x).
• As the build process is quite complicated, sometimes there are build errors (e.q: internet connection issues)
• ...

As there are a few Qt docker images (e.q: https://hub.docker.com/r/vookimedlo/ubuntu-qt/tags/) that are maintained by the community, I am wondering if a dockerized build would be an option? (maybe audit the dockerfiles first?). I am currently experimenting a bit with dockerized builds for CI integration and I am pretty happy with it so far.

Just wanted to raise that question for discussion. In case it was already discussed before, I am sorry (I searched a bit, but couldn't find anything)

Cheers, Bernhard