Proposed changes for Pidgin 2.7.0

[Kevin Stange]

Warren Togami wrote:
> On 07/14/2009 06:05 PM, John Bailey wrote:
>> 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.
>>
<snip>
> 
> I am not suggesting forever supporting old versions of glib.  Whenever
> upstream decides for a break with legacy, the old release will remain at
> that old pidgin version.
> 
> Might we consider calling post-break 3.x?

I don't think it matters what we call it, really, but the major version
number change is reserved for API breakage.  We have a lot of that
planned, but that'd push off the next release with substantial features
for a potentially long time with a lot of different code to merge.  I
don't think we want to wait that long.

> Whatever the break point is called, could we have a critical bug-fix and
> security only branch of the pre-break?  Declare this branch supported
> until 2011, and occasionally do point releases for important reasons.

This is a lot of extra work if our developers have to maintain and test
this branch for backports since none of us will be using it and the
changed code may not apply cleanly.  How are you handling pidgin 1.5.1
in RHEL 3?  Why not handle it the same way here?

Theoretically someone is backporting security fixes for old Pidgin on
platforms like Ubuntu and Debian without us.  Lenny is apparently still
on 2.4.3 and is at "stable" for Debian.

Kevin