Debian. Isn't the whole point of willingly choosing Debian instead of practically *any* other distribution to explicitly *avoid* any software that is less than 5 years old and work only with old and proven stuff that does not move a single millimeter anymore?

Don't misunderstand me. I mean I really try my best to avoid using any bleeding edge stuff when writing software (I once criticized bitcoin-wx for using a bleeding edge wx-widgets version that was *not* in widespread use), I consider something stable and available and usable for mainstream development if it is in the standard repositories of Ubuntu LTS. I had the same kind of problems when I started TorChat 5(!) years ago with python 2.6 (stable on Ubuntu Hardy at that time and widely used everywhere), soon after the Debian users started complaining that it would not work with their ancient python version.

There were even a few Windows-98 users (imagine! win98!), I even installed win98 in wmvare to see what strange problem they had with python-2.6 on win-98 and to see if I could fix it (and fixed it!) but eventually I decided that it is just not reasonably possible to care about all these exotic corner cases (and a Debian stable user (==conservative by definition) who wants to install the latest bleeding edge software is an exotic corner case). I don't have an army of programmers and testers working for me, At some point I must make a decision and then stick to it. In my case this is the software and libs and their versions that are available in Ubuntu.