About ProgressReport and msn-pecan

[Felipe Contreras]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 1:18 AM, Sean Egan <seanegan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Are they using GLib 2.0.0? That's not most, that's ancient history.

In any case, making Pidgin work on their systems is *their* job. They
could very well create a compatibility layer, patch Pidgin, or
distribute a newer GLib that only Pidgin uses. But why would they if
Pidgin is doing that for them?

-- 
Felipe Contreras