new pidgin

[Shreevatsa R]

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 9:57 AM, Joel Thibault (MacPorts)
<pgijnxn02 at sneakemail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 3:55 AM, Ryan Schmidt ryandesign-at-macports.org wrote:
>> On May 2, 2008, at 23:15, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
>>
>>> On May 2, 2008, at 9:40 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On May 2, 2008, at 12:47 PM, MAS! wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I had a look for the new pidgin once and decided to not
>>>>>> update pidgin as I disagree with the new features such
>>>>>> as automatic resize of the input text area.
>>>>>
>>>>> I see.. btw, IMHO, that's a real pity :(
>>>>
>>>> Yeah, that doesn't sound like a good reason not to update the port. If a
>>>> new version of software is released, the port should be updated to that
>>>> version (assuming it compiles on our supported platforms and such). If
>>>> there's a need for keeping the older version around, then I agree with the
>>>> previous poster who said a new port should then be created (by copying the
>>>> older version of the pidgin port).
>>>
>>> I think this change has actually caused the pidgin project to fork, so
>>> there's probably an alternate port that could be created from the forked
>>> code that doesn't have the resizing input text area.
>>
>> Maybe I don't understand the issue, but it seems like it would be simpler to
>> just have a checkbox in the preferences, or something, rather than fork the
>> whole project.
>
> Indeed.  The forkers suggested exactly that.  However, the maintainers
> refused, and a new project "funpidgin" was born.  From funpidgin's
> perspective, this is only the latest in a history of arrogant moves by
> the pidgin maintainers.
>
> More background:
>
> http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/30/1822237&from=rss
> http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4986
> http://funpidgin.sourceforge.net/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funpidgin
>

>From the Pidgin developers' perspective, they are honestly trying to
improve things, added this feature because many people asked for it,
are spending an enormous amount of time carefully listening to how the
feature affects users and responding to them, users who say "I
shouldn't have to explain why I want something, you SHOULD just make
it the way I want" are just being unreasonable, options are expensive,
and this is only the latest in a series of short-lived "forks" that
spring up every time they make even the most well-justified change,
such as moving from GTK1 to GTK2 or from a mess of overlayed icons to
uniform protocol-independent status icons.

More background:
http://pidgin.im/~elb/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/giving_back.html
http://www.pidgin.im/~seanegan/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/momentum.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-January/msg00861.html
http://www.pidgin.im/~seanegan/cgi-bin/pyblosxom.cgi/identity.html
http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/4986

Anyway, to bring it back relevant to MacPorts:
It is highly ironic, in protest of the Pidgin developers deciding what
users want and implementing it despite some opposition, the MacPorts
packager deciding what users want and not updating the package despite
some demand :P