How come Pidgin doesn't have any official debs out?

[user1397]

I know about all the community built debs that have alread been made, but I am just wondering why on this page: http://pidgin.im/download/ there are only rpm's (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora)

If the largest linux user base is ubuntu (I have no backup of this, it is just the way things seem now wouldn't you agree? or at least that the ubuntu user base s the most active and excited around?), then shouldn't they have an official deb for ubuntu (or 2 - one for debian and one for ubuntu) ?

This just seems logical to me if they want to have the widest adoption of their software.

Note: This is an objective argument, I have nothing against the pidgin devs' ways...

[tkjacobsen]

Here is part of the explanation: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhyPackagesExist

BTW they should not build packages for ubuntu if the ubuntu community does it because the community probably knows how to make the ubuntu packages better.

[Pobega]

Well, the developers themselves probably use RPM based distributions, so they know how to package for them. If you don't use APT it's very hard to learn how it works, and all about it's quirks and little features. The easiest thing for them to do is to just rely on the communit{y,ies} to build the Debian binaries themselves.

If you're interested there is an official Debian binary out, it's available at packages.debian.org in the unstable branch. And Ubuntu will probably have a binary out in the near future.

[user1397]

Ah, ok that makes sense.