Pidgin 2.14.0 String Freeze and Release Date

[Gary Kramlich]

Greetings Programs!

I apologize for the lack of updates but it has been a very busy few
months and I promise a formal update is coming SOON (tm) but I'm still
fighting the imminent BitBucket Mercurial shutdown and I will be doing
that formal update once we are completely off of BitBucket.  We are
currently just using BitBucket for pull requests, and have plans to move
to Reviewboard, but I need to finish integrating it with our authentication.

Anyways, the real reason for this is email is to formerly announce the
string freeze and release date for Pidgin 2.14.0.  We are officially
string frozen as of right now and the Transifex Project[1] has been
updated with the latest POT file.

So now that we are string frozen, it's important to note that we are
currently targeting a release date/time of 2020-06-10 at 0100 UTC.  This
date/time has been chosen as our only valid Windows code signing
certificate is going to be expiring later next week and we're not sure
how long it's going to take to get it renewed.

That said, there are some VERY important things to note about Pidgin
2.14.0 that affect developers, packagers, and users.  Note a complete
list of changes in 2.14.0 can be found in the ChangeLog [2].

First, it is the last minor release of Pidgin 2. What that means is, we
will not be accepting new API/features for the Pidgin 2 code base
anymore.  Our resources are already stretched super thin trying to get
Pidgin 3 into a usable state and we just physically can't afford the
time to be working on new features in Pidgin 2.  That said, if bad bugs
or security issues are found we will of course release Pidgin 2.14.y as
necessary, but that is it.  After 2.14.0, Pidgin 2 is officially in
maintenance mode.

Secondly, Pidgin 2.14.0 is the first Pidgin release to use the new stand
alone libgnt library which can be found at our new Mercurial hosting
[3].  It's a little short on documentation at the moment, but it uses
meson as the build system and should be pretty straight forward.  We
will get the docs written soon, but would welcome any patches to get it
done faster.  The libgnt repository currently follows the same branching
scheme as pidgin and we will be releasing libgnt 2.14.0 from the
release-2.x.y branch as we release pidgin 2.14.0 from its release-2.x.y
branch.  Both files will be available under the Sourceforge Project [3]
as normal but will not be mirrored to BitBucket as they're just going to
delete it July 1st [4] anyways.

I take full responsibility for the delay in getting this information out
to you all.  This email was original supposed to be sent this past
Tuesday, but then things drastically changed around the world and my
priorities shifted.

[1] https://www.transifex.com/pidgin/pidgin/
[2] https://keep.imfreedom.org/pidgin/pidgin/file/release-2.x.y/ChangeLog
[3] https://keep.imfreedom.org/libgnt/libgnt/
[4] https://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin/
[5] https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-bitbucket

Thanks,

--
Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com>