Two news items of interest

[John Bailey]

Hey, everyone.

I just wanted to give packagers a heads-up on two recent developments that are
probably pretty important to you.

The first item is that we are currently in string freeze (scheduled for at least
16 days starting on and including 2009-07-13).  This string freeze is in
preparation for the release of Pidgin 2.6.0, including corresponding updates to
Finch and libpurple.  This release is somewhat significant in that we now
officially support voice and video on the XMPP protocol (also known as Jabber).
 This support is, of course, optional.  Enabling this support indirectly
requires the use of glib 2.14.0 or newer due to the requirements of farsight2,
one of the new dependencies required for VV support.

The second item is likely only of interest to a few of you who suppport older
distributions.  I have proposed on our development list that we change the
minimum glib and GTK+ version requirements for libpurple and Pidgin when we
release Pidgin 2.7.0.  The minimum versions I proposed are glib 2.12.0 and GTK+
2.10.0.  These two library versions were released less than 24 hours apart, thus
I consider them to be the matched set.  They are currently just over three years
old.  Voting on the issue is ongoing, thus far with no votes against the change.
 Voting among our developers and major contributors will remain open until we
announce the release of Pidgin 2.6.0.

Keep in mind that this DOES NOT AFFECT Pidgin 2.6.0.  We have already committed
to packagers that 2.6.0 will not change minimum requirements (currently 2.0.0
for both GTK+ and glib) unless using the VV features.

Some participants in the discussion on the development list wanted advisory
input on if/how this will affect packagers.  If anyone can provide this
information, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks,
John

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 835 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://pidgin.im/cgi-bin/mailman/private/packagers/attachments/20090714/d51cf6bd/attachment.pgp>