Awhile ago we dropped Pidgin 2.x.y to maintenance mode but it appears that quite a few people didn't notice that or aren't quite sure what that means. So today we're going to revisit that and describe what exactly that entails.
When it comes to how software is supported there are a few levels which everyone describes in their own way. For Pidgin we basically use actively developed, maintenance mode, and abandoned.
Actively developed as you might imagine means it is the current focus of the team. This typically means that all new features, bug fixes, and everything else will be worked on. When something is actively developed, releases will be frequest (for some definition of frequent).
As implied earlier, maintenance mode isn't the focus of the team. The team will work on it if a security issue or a pretty bad bug is identified, but otherwise we just kind of let it sit since it is in a working state. However, the majority of the work when something is in maintenance mode actually comes from outside of the core development team.
This work comes from contributors who are generally running into issues and need to get them fixed. The so called "itch scratching" contributors. If they provide a patch to us and it is high quality with minimal side effects we will go ahead and accept it to the a project in maintenance mode. When enough of those stack up, we will do a release.
The important thing to note here though is that they need to have minimal side effects. When something is in maintenance mode, we do not add new API. The entire point of maintenance mode is to keep it running smoothly as best you can. You could almost think of it as a car you've paid of for a couple of years and now you're just trying to keep it running because it's generally cheaper than buying a new car.
Finally, when it comes to abandoned, the best example we have is Gaim. Gaim was renamed to Pidgin in 2007 following a trademark dispute. However, we still have the Gaim source code online for historical reasons but we don't anything with it. We will not accept patches and we don't work on it.
Although I did do an April Fools' joke in 2022 where I turned "Pidgin Night" on my Twitch stream to Gaim night as April Fools' fell on a Thursday that year. During that stream, we did manage to get Gaim compiled an running on my machine running Debian unstable at the time.
Hopefully this clears some things up. While Pidgin 2.x.y isn't our focus at all we do want to make sure that users who are using it can continue to use it which is precisely why it's in maintenance mode instead of abandoned.
I hope you're enjoying these posts! Remember they go live for patrons at 9AM CST on Mondays and go public at 12AM CST on Thursdays! If there's something specific you'd like to see me cover here, please comment below!
Top comments (0)