Proposed changes for Pidgin 2.7.0

[John Bailey]

Hey, everyone,

It's come up recently in several venues of discussion including #pidgin and
devel at conference.pidgin.im that our policy of supporting old glib and GTK+ is
ridiculous and limiting.

Recent examples of this include the fix in 2.5.8 and im.pidgin.pidgin for
functions used in the new Yahoo! authentication scheme and the fact that a
change from a GList to a more appropriate GQueue wasn't reasonable due to chunks
of GQueue's API being glib 2.4+.  Let's also not forget that we are shipping
copies of GTK+ widgets wholesale, including the ancient eggtrayicon thing
(replaced by GtkStatusIcon in GTK+ 2.10) and GtkComboBox (introduced in GTK+ 2.6).

In discussion in #pidgin, Paul, Kevin, and myself expressed a strong desire to
kill support for old glib and GTK+.  Given what we are including in-tree to work
on these ancient versions of libraries, I propose that for 2.7.0 we move to an
absolute minimum of GTK+ 2.10.0 and Glib 2.12.0 (these were released in early
July 2006).  Ideally, I would like to require even newer versions of both, but
I'm compromising with the minimum version needed to kill all the extra libegg
and GTK+ code that we're carrying.

I know there is going to be some resistance to this, but we can't stay in the
stone age forever.  We did previously discuss supporting old library versions
for 3 years, and this proposal fits that rough consensus that we reached then
with more than a week to spare.  Note that I am proposing this change for our
version 2.7.0.  I would propose it immediately, however, we have already made a
commitment to packagers that 2.6.0 without VV support will remain compatible
with ancient libraries.

Now, I ask for a vote from our current developers and Crazy Patch Writers.  I
think holding this vote open until we release Pidgin 2.6.0 is a reasonable
timeframe within which to cast votes.  To start the voting off, I cast a vote of
yes.

John


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