> Which point of criticism is this meant to address? In a normal open source project they wouldn't have to rely on the company providing the source code in tarball form as a special favor,
No, you misunderstood this one.
A lot of major open source projects have processes where source tarballs are released to distro packagers a short while (e.g. a week or a couple of days) before the public release announcement and public tarball availability. This gets you last-minute testing, and makes the distro partners happy because they get to brag about same-day packages when the release goes live, which also makes the users happy when they read about the shiny new release and wonder if they can get it yet. KDE has been doing this for 20 years via it's packagers mailing list, and so do many others.
If you don't it that way, dumb things happen like distros releasing RC tags as "we have the release now" so they can announce same-day availability, and occasionally bugs slip through. Been there, done that.
You probably understood this as "normally you could just look at the git repo", but that's also true for Qt 6.
No, you misunderstood this one.
A lot of major open source projects have processes where source tarballs are released to distro packagers a short while (e.g. a week or a couple of days) before the public release announcement and public tarball availability. This gets you last-minute testing, and makes the distro partners happy because they get to brag about same-day packages when the release goes live, which also makes the users happy when they read about the shiny new release and wonder if they can get it yet. KDE has been doing this for 20 years via it's packagers mailing list, and so do many others.
If you don't it that way, dumb things happen like distros releasing RC tags as "we have the release now" so they can announce same-day availability, and occasionally bugs slip through. Been there, done that.
You probably understood this as "normally you could just look at the git repo", but that's also true for Qt 6.