Proposed changes for Pidgin 2.7.0

[John Bailey]

Warren Togami wrote:
> 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.

Strictly speaking, it's not necessary.  That said, many of us are tired 
of being limited to the API available in these old versions of both GTK+ 
and glib.

A perfect example is the Yahoo! protocol plugin changes in version 
2.5.7, which would not build on RHEL4.  We now have glib version checks 
in the code, but we have so many of these version checks with alternate 
code paths that it's hard to follow a number of functions.  Moving to a 
minimum of GTK+ 2.10.0 and glib 2.12.0 will allow us to get rid of 
almost all of these version checks, thus significantly simplifying a 
number of functions.

We also are shipping entire widgets from GTK+ (GtkComboBox, added in 
GTK+ 2.6.0) and libegg (the eggtrayicon thing added to GTK+ 2.10.0 as 
GtkStatusIcon) for no other reason than backward compatibility with old 
GTK+ versions.  I didn't like this at the time (although at the time the 
eggtrayicon thing was essentially mandatory), and I like it even less now.

We're additionally hindering third-party plugins such as the Facebook 
protocol plugin by continuing to support old versions.  Technically 
these plugins can state their own requirements, but this makes their 
support that much more difficult when they have to tell their users that 
Pidgin and libpurple will work on a given system but the plugin will not.

John