Heyaloha, tl;dr: wontfix (cantfix)
It's awesome to see some activity! :D I'm effectively the maintainer of telegram-purple. Not because I actually *develop* it forward, but because I seem to be the only person who responds to and manages pull requests, and occasionally make a new release or a small adjustment here and there. You might want to read up on https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=809623#155 and https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=835141 for some history. In short: My reason for abandoning debianization is that libtgl, the underlying library, is unmaintained, unmaintainable, already has several unfixed known bugs, and was never meant for its current use. I'm just waiting for the day it stops working forever. Hence the attempt to replace libtgl by TDLib: https://github.com/majn/telegram-purple/issues/480 You are correct, libtgl is not really portable to big endian. I tried once, here are the ruins of the attempt: https://github.com/BenWiederhake/tgl/tree/historic/endian-correct (Note that quite a lot has happened since then, for example merging 'tl-parser' into 'tgl'.) The main issue is that tgl is littered with "write(fd, &somestruct, sizeof(somestruct))" all over the place, reading and writing and computing with internal structs that will be reused later. The best approaches I can see are a) rewriting, b) wrapping everything in reads/writes that copy the data to a temporary buffer, fix all endian'd values, and only then write it to the fd, or c) just using TDLib. All of these option sound terrible. telegram-purple 1.4.3 can't go into Debian. I have no idea how you managed to sneak 1.4.1 into Debian, given how buggy it is. Holy cow, over a hundred users! And that's not yet counting the >100 people who installed it manually! https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=telegram-purple If you want, I'd be happy to collaborate on porting of telegram-purple away from libtgl and to tdlib, as outlined in this issue: https://github.com/majn/telegram-purple/issues/480 Interested in making telegram-purple 2.0.0 together? :) Cheers, Ben PS: For reference: Someone made an attempt to rewrite telegram-purple, but the code is not much more than two stubs side-by-side, and there is no license so I can't actually use it: https://github.com/ars3niy/tdlib-purple/issues/2