On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 2:50 AM Gary Kramlich <[email protected]> wrote: > We've been anticipating that GTK2 will be removed from all distros most > likely this year. We have been busting our asses to get something together so > that Pidgin can remain in distros, but we just do not have the resources. If > you look at the last release, you will see that absolutely everything came > from me personally, if you look at the releases before that you'll see that I > am the main driving factor. When you force me to respond to things I've > already asked you not to do it cuts into that precious time and slows things > down. > > And I'll reiterate, removing from testing *WILL* increase my workload. We've > seen it from Ubuntu LTS's that had old buggy versions to Whonix and > everywhere in between. Users refuse to use a flatpak and instead attempt to > compile themselves and then require a ton of support. Which will be even more > so if `apt get build-dep` isn't an option because it's been removed from > testing. > > Regardless, you are going to do what you're going to do and I can not control > that. But I am pleading with you to please not make my burnout (which has > been mentioned in the release announcements which you claim to have read) any > worse.
I don't want to make you feel pressured, but I acknowledge that my work to try to remove gtk2 from Debian is unavoidably adding pressure to maintainers of gtk2 apps. I am trying to be particularly sensitive about Pidgin. It is the only gtk2 app other than the Debian Installer that is still in Testing and not marked for autoremoval from Testing because of the gtk2 transition. Do you think that Pidgin 3 might be usable for IRC and XMPP by mid-2027? It's my opinion that those are the 2 key protocols supported by Pidgin 2 that are of most interest to Debian users. Debian does have some other IRC and XMPP apps though, so if Pidgin could only handle one of those, it might still work. Thank you, Jeremy Bícha
