The maintainer of the Telegram Desktop packages for Fedora and RPM Fusion has announced the removal of the packages from the repositories. A day prior, the maintainer for Gentoo also announced the discontinuation of support for Telegram Desktop. In both cases, there is a willingness to return the packages to the repositories if a new maintainer can be found who is ready to take over the maintenance.
The reasons given for discontinuing support for Telegram Desktop by current maintainers include the unwelcoming and unfriendly attitude of the developers, who do not even attempt to resolve the issues that lead to problems in building their source code in Linux distributions. Reports of such issues are immediately closed with a 'WONTFIX' status and a recommendation to use semi-proprietary binary builds from the official website.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that problems preventing the building of packages regularly arise in new releases, and all attempts to address shortcomings in upstream result in statements that the developers only support their own static builds and all problems when creating custom builds should be resolved independently. For example, support for builds with Qt versions beyond 5.15 has recently been discontinued, and all inquiries with suggestions on how to address the resulting issue have simply been ignored.
It is also noted that the overall confusion in the organization of the Telegram Desktop build complicates maintenance. The project is divided into four different repositories (the application, the library for WebRTC, scripts for the CMake build system, and the library for audio processing), but only one repository produces releases, while the other three are merely updated as development progresses without fixing their state. Additionally, building is complicated by dependency conflicts that arise when trying to support Wayland and x11, PulseAudio and ALSA, OpenSSL and LibreSSL.
Source: opennet.ru
