Maintainers of the Telegram Desktop packages for Fedora and RPM Fusion announced the removal of packages from the repositories. A day prior, the maintainer for Gentoo also announced the cessation of support for Telegram Desktop. In both cases, there was a statement of readiness to return the packages to the repositories if a new maintainer could be found willing to take over the support.
The reasons given for the withdrawal of support for Telegram Desktop by the current maintainers include the distasteful and unfriendly attitude of the developers, who do not even attempt to resolve the errors that lead to problems compiling their source code in Linux distributions. Reports of such errors are immediately closed with a 'WONTFIX' label and a recommendation to use semi-proprietary binary builds from the official website.
The situation is exacerbated by the fact that problems hindering the packaging regularly appear in new releases, and all attempts to resolve shortcomings upstream are reduced to statements that the developers only support their own static builds and any issues in creating custom builds should be resolved independently. For example, support for building versions with Qt greater than 5.15 was recently discontinued, and all inquiries with suggestions on how to address the emerging issue were simply ignored.
There is also a noted overall confusion in the organization of the Telegram Desktop build, complicating maintenance. The project is split into four different repositories (the application, the webrtc library, scripts for the cmake build system, and the audio processing library), but only releases are formed in one repository, while the other three are simply updated as development progresses without fixing the state. Additionally, the build is hampered by conflicts with dependencies arising from attempts to support Wayland and x11, PulseAudio and ALSA, OpenSSL and LibreSSL.
Burimi: opennet.ru
