There is no problem to compile it yourself. We have never asked pidgin devs to compile the package for Slack, because we can do it ourselves.

And, BTW, gaim 1.5 was/is way better for me than their 2.0 stable.

Seems silly to move it to unsupported just because the developers don't use/like Slackware and stated so on their website. I hate when emotional reactions affect projects. If there were some kind of logical or technical reason for it being removed, I'd be fine.

Pat saying that he doesn't recall ever doing anything to the developers is just silly. Of course he didn't, they didn't make any personal attacks. They simply said they don't like Slackware because it doesn't have "true" (to them, ie, dependency resolution) packages. I love Pat, but he needs to separate himself from the distro. Two different things.

I consider this to be very rude and offensive. I haven't seen any slackware users going around bashing package managers of other distros or bashing an IM client, especially one of GAIM's popularity. WTF has a package manager have to do with Pidgin? It makes me feel really angry, no one requested them to build a package for Slackware, and I compiled it just fine using a slackbuild from slackbuilds.org. Thank you for your rudeness and goodbye, I say.Off I go removing Pidgin and going back to Psi or Kopete.

Somehow I feel there's more politics involved here than meets the eye. Where there's hatred, anger, bashing, etc., there's politics.

who are these people developing pidgin? if they are not smart enough to install slackware & compile source code on it then they should not be writing any software at all period! i dont think i want pidgin on my PC...

I was installing current today from the "changes and Hints text" for the first time when I ran across this package. After I had gotten everything updated I checked the new changelog to find Pat's post.

I've downloaded and installed alot of distro's just to see what all the "hooplah" was all about but it's just hard to match the simplicity and stability of Slackware. Maybe I wrong but wouldn't the folks at Pidgin want everyone to like and use their product. If I ever wrote a program I would be glad to have someone like Pat with his reputation & dedication to include it in his distro.

My 0.02$
 

Like many here I too was completely shocked by this situation.

At first I said to myself, "well maybe the pidgeon people just banged out a quick blurb and then moved on". Then I read it again, and then noticed the time frame of this. It's quite evident that they have TRUE distaste (to put it nicely) for Slackware. I'm of the opinion that the original web-page was inappropriate.

As a result I will NOT use pidgeon; and they won't get my donation dollars until they make a formal apology. Changing the page does not undo the damage that has been done. I can't condone that hate speech by using their product until they apologize.

You know I actually went all throughout their site, and I can't see any place where they ask for a Slackware maintainer. Do you?

Regarding wether Mr. Pat V over-reacted. Well, he's got my support, and my $$

Let's face it, he eats alot of $hit regarding package management. But that page was malicious. You know, Mr. Pat V made a good point, the FACT that these guys can't get their act together to make a secure client is quite frightening. Because let's face it, most of us wouldn't even know how to write an IM client, but we have no problems making packages. Yet they can't do three simple packages over a full noob install? T Gosh I can smell the hubris!

agreed.
in addition he also cited security concerns; however no security update to gaim was made since 11.0 . on the other hand i don't really care, if the package is "supported".

agrees with Old Fogie, if it was not for Slackware i would probably abandon Linux completely for FreeBSD, i find Slackware easy to install/configure & maintain, Slackware is without all the cruft & kludge that totally turn me off of other distros, Slackware is clean & lean just the way i like any OS/distro to be, i hope Pat V. keeps the methods & tradition that made Slackware what it is...

Slackware is quite user friendly, just not idiot friendly...

In IRC, the questions I normally see are "why doesn't Slackware have a package manager?" when it DOES. It appears that the Pidgin folks are as aloof as the Slackware noobs when it comes to this (and apparently other things, such as compiling). I've built my own GAIM packages in the past...if a non-developer can compile Pidgin/GAIM with no issues, why can't a Pidgin developer do the same??? Slackware isn't any different than any other distribution regarding compilation.

I really think the problem boils down to someone not understanding that not every distro has to have package management with dep checking. It sounds like the developers are relying more on the dep checking than actual compilation.

I, for one, am going to support Pat on this one. When someone visits freenode's ##slackware and asks for software support, he/she is usually told to visit that software's support channel (#pidgin) for proper support, although we also tend to run interference for developers on the whole. We'll certainly help with compiling from source, but there is now a definitive line on this issue, especially with Pat backing away from Pidgin. While I don't expect the channel to be overwhelmed with requests for Pidgin support, it certainly will not dominate the channel's flow.

I'm so glad I kicked GAIM to the curb a few months ago (due to GAIM core-dumping constantly)...replaced it with Kopete.

Not that gaim didn't have it's issues with getting mozilla nss support first, and now having dependencies for gnutls. There was enough information around to get it put together and working.

But for the life of me, I can't get kopete to connect to any instant messenging server. It doesn't even complain, it just doesn't connect. So, so far I am still a fan of gaim/pidgin. It does work.

as soon as I read what the Gaim/Pidgen developers said about Slackware, I removed all installations of Gaim I used. I can't just support a project with developers saying that about my distro of choice. :P

Kopete is a better program anyway.

I would use kopete but the horizontal scroll bars look awful when a contact has a long nick or writes a long line of text. But if anyone know hows to fix that I would use it.

There are many many IM clients available:
http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=insta...&Go.x=0&Go.y=0

Not sure how good most are ... I guess you gotta go try some.

There is now an unsupported pidgin package for Slackware 11.0 (and -current as well, if you change 'stable' to 'current in the URL') at http://slackware.osuosl.org/unsupported/pidgin/stable/ . Don't know if this is mirrored to other servers as well but at least OSUOSL has it.

Both mozilla-nss-3.11.4-i486-1_slack11.0.tgz and pidgin-2.0.0-i486-1_slack11.0.tgz need to be upgraded/installed (and don't forget to remove your gaim package first!)

Eric