Allow for installation of preview (beta/alpha) releases

[dantti]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
We would like to catch regressions to our software before a major version of Qt is released, the Maintainance tool has preview versions which would be enough for us.

Describe the solution you'd like
Being able to pick the Qt provided beta versions, even better if with --latest-beta-version or --latest-preview-version

[miurahr]

@dantti could you share your considered prereleased versions in a folder list of https://download.qt.io/online/qtsdkrepository/windows_x86/desktop/ ?

aqtinstall download binaries from the above URL (for windows) and install it.
Did you suggest qt6_62_preview ?

[dantti]

Well afaik it uses the same source of packages as Qt Maintainance tool, so looks like https://download.qt.io/online/qtsdkrepository/windows_x86/desktop/qt6_dev/Updates.xml
is a better candidate as it lists 6.7.0 there

[miurahr]

@dantti
Here is a place where it make a path part online/qtsdkrepository/windows_x86/desktop/ qt6_xxx
https://github.com/miurahr/aqtinstall/blob/master/aqt/archives.py#L318-L321

    def _version_str(self) -> str:
        return ("{0.major}{0.minor}" if self.version == Version("5.9.0") else "{0.major}{0.minor}{0.patch}").format(
            self.version
        )

You are welcome to propose improvements.

[ddalcino]

Just for clarification/organization purposes, is this a duplicate of #607? I think that issue got put on hold because the user didn't describe a use case for installing qt6_dev, but you've already given a really good use case for it.

[dantti]

Yeah seems the same issue.

[ddalcino]

I don't know much about the qt6_dev branch, but I think it's pre-alpha. I would like to clarify that alpha and beta releases are already available using aqtinstall, they just aren't marked that way. We don't have a good way to programmatically infer which releases are alpha, beta, or final.

According to the commit history on https://github.com/ddalcino/qt-repo-cache (gh-pages branch, if you want to see for yourself), the final version of Qt 6.6.0 was released September 25 October 9th, 2023. It was first released (in alpha format, I think) to download.qt.io on June 15th, 2023. You've been able to install it with aqtinstall since then. There have been about five updates since then, corresponding to the beta releases and the final release. You can cross-reference with https://wiki.qt.io/QtReleasing

After each updated release, the sha256 hashes are removed from the server and regenerated about 24 hours later. Since the sha256 hashes for each release are not available, it would have been impossible to install during that period, unless you turn off the hash checks. These are turned on by default for security reasons.

[miurahr]

Duplicated with #607