libpurple unbundled?

[Etan Reisner]

On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 07:57:14PM -0400, Jonathan Pickard wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I understand that libg**m was once distributed unbundled from the
> frontends.  Might you consider reinstating an unbundled libpurple-only
> release as source or optionally binary?  If this were still so, those of us
> with strong feelings about recent UI decisions would have simply upgraded
> libpurple; personality conflicts wouldn't reach forking point, such as it
> is; and the devs could perform UI experiments to their hearts' content
> without upsetting unwilling participants.

At no point did we ship the core separate from the UIs, we have no plans
to do so at the moment. Upgrading the library without upgrading the UIs
works regardless of whether we ship separate tarballs (as can be seen from
the fact that most distributions create separate packages for libpurple
and for pidgin). And no, even had we been doing this people would not have
reacted better to the UI change. The fork did not happen because of a
"personality conflict". No one forces anyone to upgrade ever, shipped
tarballs notwithstanding.

> (FWIW, the mouse wheel in the fixed-size input is a less visually
> distracting way for me to navigate and compose medium-to-large instant
> messages than auto-resize.)

You think so, many people do not. Which is why we don't begrudge people
who really feel like they need the plugin the use of it. We just don't
think as many people actually need it as think they need it, and are more
interested in trying to make the auto-resizing work for more people than
we are in reverting the change because some people don't want to try to
use it and/or help us make it better.

> Thanks,
> Jonathan

	-Etan