Proposed changes for Pidgin 2.7.0

[Warren Togami]

On 07/14/2009 04:32 PM, Kevin Stange wrote:
> Luke Schierer wrote:
> <snip>
>> In the old gtk1 tree, we required 1.2.x where x did have a specific
>> minimum, I just do not remember it.  I think it entirely reasonable to
>> discontinue support for very ancient versions of glib, but I think,
>> minimally, we ought to compile on an out of the box debian stable and
>> out of the box most recent rhel.  I don't know off the top of my head
>> what versions these would be.
>
> Red Hat EL 5.3:
> glib2-2.12.3-4.el5_3.1
> gtk2-2.10.4-20.el5

RHEL-4 (supported until at least 2012)
glib-2.4.x
gtk-2.4.x

Both RHEL-4 and RHEL-5 currently ship pidgin-2.5.8.

I was thinking that we might be able to build RHEL-4's pidgin against a 
parallel copy of glib-2.12.x that we ship in RHEL-4 for evolution and 
firefox.  This works fine for pidgin itself and pidgin plugins that 
interact only with pidgin, but perhaps this might not work in all cases. 
  Other packages like nautilus-sendto link against both libpurple and 
nautilus.  libpurple and nautilus are linked to two different versions 
of glib.  This seems like it wont work?

What reasons exactly make it necessary to drop older glib support?  Are 
the current workarounds onerous?  An earlier discussion in #pidgin 
indicated that pidgin-3.x during 2010 would be a good cut-off for legacy 
versions of glib.

(Note: We can't enable VV on RHEL since we can't add additional 
libraries like farsight2.  So the 2.6.0 requirements remain reasonable 
for us.  Only our newer distributions can take advantage of VV and this 
is fine.)

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com