Maintainers Fedora and Gentoo Abandon Telegram Desktop App Maintenance

One of the developers who is in charge of maintaining the Telegram Desktop packages for the Linux Fedora distribution and in the RPM Fusion repository made it known recently through a post have removed the packages from the repositories.

And is that this decision comes almost simultaneously to the action i take a previous day the Gentoo Telegram package manager, which also announced the end of Telegram Desktop support for distribution. In both cases, it is indicated that they are ready to return packages to the repositories in case a new maintainer is found, ready to take maintenance into their own hands.

The reasons for the refusal of current maintainers to support Telegram Desktop within these two popular Linux distributions are called repulsive and hostile attitude of the developers which they don't even try to find out the bugs leading to problems with construction from the source on Linux distributions.

Messages about such errors are immediately closed with the sign "WONTFIX" and a recommendation to use semi-proprietary binary builds from the official site.

In the message posted by Vitaly Zaitsev (who was in charge of the Telegram Desktop packages for Fedora and RPM Fusion)

Hello everybody! Today is a great day.

I finally decided to remove the Fedora and RPM Fusion Telegram Desktop package for the following reasons:

1. They have a very hostile environment and very toxic to upstream maintainers of GNU / Linux. All errors related to distributions will be closed instantly with "WONTFIX, use our half proprietary binary, statically linked to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS libraries, from official website".

2. I have kept many GNU / Linux packages for 16 years and have never seen such a hostile upstream before. They do their best to break packaged builds and more and more needs to be corrected in each release. They always say: "We only support static builds, if you need to share them -> fix them yourself."

3. You cannot ask for help upstream on packaged builds, they will ignore you. E.g. recently they removed support for builds against Qt <5.15.

4. If you are a maintainer of GNU / Linux, they treat you like an enemy. They hate you. If anyone wants to take it, feel free, but don't forget the 1-4 points. 

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that issues preventing package builds regularly crop up in new releases, and all attempts to fix upstream glitches come down to statements that the developers only support static links tg_owt and all problems when creating your own assemblies should be solved independently.

For example, support for builds with Qt versions lower than 5.15 was recently discontinued and all requests to resolve the issue in some way were simply ignored.

As well the general confusion of the organization of the Telegram Desktop package build, the that complicates maintenance.

Well, basically the project is divided into four different repositories (application, a library for webrtc, scripts for the cmake compilation system and a library for sound processing), but only one repository is responsible for compiling the versions and the another three are simply updated as development progresses without committing.

In addition, from the mention of problems with compilation that is hampered by dependency conflicts that arise when trying to provide support for Wayland and x11, PulseAudio and ALSA, OpenSSL and LibreSSL.

Finally, regarding the position of the other side of the conflict it comes down to the fact that most of the messages about problems are irrelevant or are quickly fixed, and the disagreement lies in the unwillingness to support old versions of Qt and linking dynamic with the tg_owt library on yours.

If you want to know more about it about the note, you can check the details the following link.


3 comments, leave yours

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  1.   Miguel Rodriguez said

    Well, instead of getting annoyed, they would have been diplomatic when giving a message that due to the difficulties presented by the company's insistence on using only and exclusively its proprietary software for the compilation of the program as well as the refusal to support certain versions of Qt, they recommend using the flathub version that is updated and it should not be a problem when it comes packaged as flatpak.

  2.   Luis said

    As long as it's still available on Flathub I wouldn't have a problem ...
    but I miss the Telegram

  3.   Gabriel said

    In my case (although my experience is in manjaro) I stopped downloading it from the repositories when I saw that it was not updated frequently with respect to the "original version" so I directly downloaded the application from the Telegram page and unzipped it in My home and voila, in the style of Windows Firefox, when I open the application if there is an update, it automatically downloads it and the truth is, it works quite well.