When you install Qt from the Qt Installer, you have a selection of target platforms. On Windows, at the time of writing, this is MinGW, MSVC as regular choices, and LLVM-MinGW as a Technology Preview. This basically specifies the environment which is used to build Qt code for that packages. Most importanly, this also de-facto specifies a version of the compiler which you should use for your development work, if you use pre-built Qt.
In Qt 6.7.0, for example, we support MSVC 2022, MSVC 2019, MinGW 11.2 as compilers (see this page in the Qt documentation), but we do not provide binary Qt packages built with MSVC 2022 which is the current version of MSVC. For future releases of Qt 6, we need to move faster towards more modern MSVC 2022 and start to phase out MSVC 2019 as an older version.
This will be a change not only for the Qt release team, but also for Qt users, who use these binary packages. We want to make it as smooth as possible and got a plan which we want to share here. BTW, the below changes are only related to MSVC and do not concern MinGW packages for Windows.
In one of the next bug-fix releases of Qt 6.7, possibly in Qt 6.7.2, we will add packages built with MSVC 2022 in addition to the MSVC 2019 ones as we have now. The upcoming Qt 6.8 will have packages for Windows built with MSVC 2022 only, and MSVC 2019 ones will be discontinued in binary packages. Future Qt 6.7.x bug-fix releases will still contain builds wirh MSVC2019 in binary packages as long as Qt 6.7 is supported.
We see this as a migration path which gives MSVC users a possibility to test Qt 6.7.x binary packages with both versions of MSVC in their projects.
Please test this!
Please report any reproducible problems as comments on QTBUG-124243.
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