Comment 11 for bug 38694

I say y'all stop whining. If you want Xchat, you can install it. Gaim does IRC fine enough for use (it's all I use, actually), and it's a fine base client for those that don't use IRC often (whom Ubuntu is targetting AFAIK).

We're not removing it completely, folks, just not installing it by default. Since this has been discussed by the development team already, I'm closing this. If anyone wants to hear from the devs, check the recent thread on ubuntu-devel, and if anyone has any useful (i.e. not redundant) points to make, go ahead and reopen this.