Was Pat getting any help from gaim/pidgin dev team, if now it is so important that gaim/pidgin became unsupported. When did they support it especially for Slack.

This statement has the same importance as the gaim is not supported for Alien Hominid Linux, because we don't use it, so it's lame if we don't,despite I've never asked any help and it compiles correctly.

Nobody asks them to build packages, there are distro devs for this job(it doesn't matter if distro is either gentoo, or debian, or suse, or slack).

This post has a bit of background on this Pidgin issue...
http://lists.slackbuilds.org/piperma...ay/000464.html

So pidgin support is dropped not because of an argument between Pat and pidgin devs, but due to pidgin reliance on "obsolete" and their own modified mozilla-nss sources. Am I correct?

However, that does not explain why pidgin devs have accused Slackware of being "lame" OS.

I think that's an oversimplification at best, and in some part, incorrect.
Pidgin has not modified mozilla-nss - it does, however, seem that they're expecting a nonstandard mozilla-nss (probably something that their "chosen" distros do to it). Note that this *seems* to be the case, but the Pidgin devs are stating otherwise, so do your own research and come to your own conclusion.
As for why Pat dropped pidgin into unsupported/ - the emotions and reasons involved are either obvious and/or speculative (some combination of the two). You'd have to ask Pat for any more than that, and I honestly don't recommend asking him -- he's almost certainly not going to reply to a gazillion emails on the subject, so you'd be wasting both your time and his time.

Please. Don't fool yourself, there weren't any "security issues" with Gaim before the developers said they didn't like Slackware because of its package management. This whole ordeal is just stupid, Gaim is one of the best GTK-based IM clients available, and last time I checked, every developer and every distro creator didn't necessarily have to like one another's work for their projects to go together. If that were the case, open source software would crash and burn tomorrow.

I'm going to keep using Slackware because I like it. I'm going to keep using Gaim because I like it. The fact that the Gaim developers hate my distro of choice means utterly nothing to me: I probably don't like theirs, either. Pat either needs to stop overreacting and just put the package back in and not drop something that's been in Slackware for years just because someone said something he doesn't like about his distro, or he needs to at least replace it with something GTK-based. Kopete is great, if you're using KDE or have the libs installed.

Speaking of which, Pat said some pretty harsh things about GNOME back in the day too, and dropped support. I guess that means I should've have uninstalled Slackware since that's my desktop of choice.

I love OSS, but I can do without the stupid soap operas and people's personal pride being directly tied to their distro of choice.

shadin, bah humbug! phooey on gaim/pidon! ;p

@shadin - GAIM is a great client, there is no doubt. But I am somewhat confused by your term "soap opera". Slackware is pretty much a one-man-job, so I can understand Pat dropping GNOME, but dropping Pidgin wasn't (in my opinion) done because Pat was offended, but because their statement was fairly harsh. I'm not a GNOME or GTK2 fan, but I won't say that GNOME sucks or that GAIM sucks. I also won't say that "I actively dislike a distribution" simply because I don't use it. Just because you can't respond to mails from users by typing "You need to type: sudo apt-get install gnutls libgcrypt libgpg-error" does not mean that a distribution's install is "broken". It's simply not fair to put out that kind of a statement, after all-if you don't like it, you don't have to use it, but i don't see the need in bashing Slackware just because of the way it works. It-s not hard to list the dependancies on the main page and put a disclaimer that there will be no official packages for Slackware, so I don't see the need for hammering of Slackware that Pidgin's developers have shown. Just my 2c :)

So noted. ;p

But WAS their statement harsh? They voiced an opinion about a distro and why they don't provide packages for it.

Let's look at this. None of the developers use Slackware. Several of them dislike the distro because of history of broken installs and non-existant package management. Okay, I don't know what they mean by history of broken installs, as that's a bit too vague (and I doubt anyone has asked them to actually clarify). The package management, though, sure. Someone that uses distros with dep-resolution exclusively would think that Slackware packages came over on the Ark. The fact that they don't consider them "true" packages, I can understand, as they're basically just zip files with pkgtool to keep track of where the files are unzipped to.

I just don't understand how those two sentences are so inflammatory that suddenly Pidgin is ripped from Slackware and all Slack fans feel obligated to uninstall the program. That's precisely what I mean by "soap opera". God forbid anyone dislike Slackware.

I think by broken installs they mean someone has installed gaim on their computer without the required deps (or somesuch) and has then asked the gaim folks for assistance. It appears they are resentful that we don't provide automatic dependancy resolution, and feel that it is therefore Slackware's fault (and not the fault of those users) that their time has been wasted.

Or at least that's my take on it, could be wrong.

I believe you all haven't read rworkman post and link. When you read, you will understand that there is problem in building pidgin without changing mozilla-nss. We all know that Pat doesn't like modifying original packages. As well, he doesn't want to add extra dependencies of gnutls just for pidgin.


And, btw, can anybody patch the pidgin that it could work in default Slack? It won't be official, but available in repos. And the problem will be over.

Considering that they don't release packages for anything but Fedora Core and Red Hat, yet no other distribution got a little personal flame, I would say yes. If they put their opinion for every distribution the developers ever used on that page, maybe that would be another situation entirely. But it would also be completely unprofessional and, again, pointless as it has no bearing on the topic being addressed on said page.

Right below the Slackware entry, they have:

Not:

It is one thing to not have developers using a particular distribution, that is naturally understandable. Going farther, I have no problem with developers saying "We have no developers using distribution xxxx, so can't build binaries for it", that is also completely understandable. But beyond that, any other comment about the issue is simply needless mudslinging. Which, as we are clearly experiencing currently, stirs up a whole lot of negative emotion on the part of all parties involved, and is totally counterproductive for the open source community.

The point here is that it doesn't matter why they aren't building Slackware packages, simply because nobody has asked (or, arguably, cares). It was sufficient for them to just say they don't have a Slackware build environment (which was apparently suitable enough for them to do for every other distribution in the world), no need to elaborate on why they don't have a Slackware build environment, or their thoughts about anyone else using their software on Slackware.

Pat has packages for both stable (11.0) and -current here:
http://slackware.osuosl.org/unsupported/pidgin/

The thing was, why were they even doing this when Pat was doing it? Was it because noobs kept whining to them about providing a Slack package? That appears to be the case. Why else would they even be complaining? Also, I fail to see what the big deal is. Building a GAIM package isn't really rocket science...I'd expect more from guys so intimate with code. They've become too reliant on package managers that automate dep checking instead of understanding what goes on behind the scenes. They also have to realize that Pat is trying to update Slackware...its a moving target just as the other distros are, so why pick on Slackware in particular? Maybe because they're a bit aloof about raw (read REAL) distros...dunno.

Their opinion is their own, but what they said was a bit of B.S. Before making such opinions, maybe they should have attempted to make a better attempt at trying to understand what was going on.

I don't think Pat went overboard. It's obvious they don't understand what they're complaining about and made some bad comments. Yes, they were bad because they were assuming, and we all know that saying about the word ASSUMPTION.

From slack current changelog

http://slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=i386:

to which the xmms team replied http://www.xmms.org/:

hmmm, one of the longest running applications seemed to like us and had nothing but great things to say.

Too bad pidgin dev's didn't IM the xmms team for /dev/support :D

I still use xmms (and will until xmms2 will be available). There was no problem to get it running.