About ProgressReport and msn-pecan

[Sean Egan]

2008/6/12 John Bailey <rekkanoryo at rekkanoryo.org>:
> We don't all insist on supporting the "stone age," so to speak, but even those
> of us that support forgetting about the older library versions realize that it
> will break things for some people.  We have debated the compatibility thing on
> more than one occasion, and we did finally come to a consensus to require glib
> 2.4.0 (I think, but it might have been 2.6.0) for 3.0.0.

I think Warren Togami, from RedHat, has been the biggest influence in
us keeping our GTK+ dependencies modest. The reasoning is that Pidgin
is in a unique class of software that can break at a moment's notice
by no fault of its own (as has happened before). When this happens, a
distro has to do an upgrade to all the releases it currently supports,
which may be many years old. If a protocol breaks, or has a security
issue, it's probably easier to just upgrade to the latest version of
Pidgin than it is to cherry-pick the fixes to every released version
that happens to be in a distro. Since it's not plausible for a distro
to upgrade a major library just to fix a Pidgin bug, and the Pidgin
developers are really the only ones seriously affected by the
restriction, it makes most sense just not to depend on anything too
recent.