So long, and thanks for the insults.

[Sean Egan]

On 5/12/07, Gwenhael LE MOINE <gwenhael.le.moine at gmail.com> wrote:
> For the record gaim/pidgin has _always_ (for me) worked flawlessly on
> Slackware. Every single release and cvs snapshot I compiled "by
> hand" did so without a single hitch, ever. Maybe the "several of [you
> that] actively dislike that distribution for its history of broken
> installs" should just get a clue...

I'm not familiar with the history of that file. It looks like it was
somewhat recently edited as the revision you pasted is certainly a bit
low on details. Would you consider the current revision of
http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhyPackagesExist to be fair? If not,
what changes would be appropriate?

Given its reputation as the "1337, original distro", I think Slackware
has a tendency (like Gentoo and it's "you're smarter because you
compile stuff" reputation) to attract a lot of users who don't use the
distro as intended, often due to lack of experience. We see a lot of
these users, and they refuse to believe it's not our fault that Pidgin
refuses to work for them, so I doubt they report the bugs downstream.

The most recent problem Slackware users have reported is that the
location of the Mozilla SSL libraries has changed within the past few
weeks. This has left a non-trivial number of Slackware users unable to
use Pidgin with SSL.

The first problem I remember was within weeks of my first involvement
with Gaim, in 2000, when Slackware shipped a non-standard release of
GTK+, a significant system library that required work-arounds in
Pidgin.

Obviously, Slackware wouldn't still be around if it were actually as
broken as it appears to be, and (since none of use Slack) we're not
sure how much of the problems reported to us are caused by
inexperienced users versus the distro itself. And in either case, we
don't know how to best fix them. So we find it best to give Slackware
users the same advice we give Gentoo users (who have all the same
problems): use your distro the way it's intended to be used, and if
you have problems with it, ask them first.

Does that clear things up at all?

-s.