Suggestion to drop kopete from KDE Gear

[Heiko Becker]

Hello,

I wanted to keep kopete at least buildable against recent version of its 
dependencies by removing some obsolete parts. But it occured to me that if 
I were to continue with that, there wouldn't be much left. It suffers from 
the same problems with dead or (at least dying) protocols I wrote down for 
ktp [1], so I'll just add some relevant things affecting kopete:

- Contrary to ktp it doesn't use pidgin for ICQ/AIM, but a custom 
implementation, the result is the same. AIM ceased to exist and ICQ changed 
its protocol (and thus kopete silently fails to with the latter).
- XMPP/Jabber allows to connect, but joining a room crashes kopete, which 
matches a bug report from 2019 [2]
- winpopup was apparently discontinued after Windows XP
- qq: I'm hesistant to give them my phone number to manually register an 
account (the link behind the register button times out). Pidgin removed 
support for this in 2011, which is roughly the same time a non-porting 
commit touched the code and there is a bug report that it indeed doesn't 
work [3]

I didn't have/find an instance to test Bonjour and my distro doesn't 
provide a package for libmeanwhile, so no testing of these.

In addition, it has a very long list of (partly very old) bugs [4] (no idea 
how many, bugzilla stops after 500), and my impression from testing a few 
is that many of them are easily reproduceably today.

As much as I used kopete for chatting back in the day, I seriously think 
it's broken enough to stop shipping it with Gear, if nobody surprisingly 
steps up and does at least some basic maintenance.

If you know anybody who's still around and cares for kopete, please feel 
free to bring this mail to their attention.

Regards,
Heiko

[1] https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/release-team/2023-June/013080.html
[2] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412228
[3] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=460744
[4] 
https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=CONFIRMED&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&list_id=2429758&order=changeddate%20DESC%2Cbug_status%2Cpriority%2Cassigned_to%2Cbug_id&product=kopete&query_format=advanced