XChat's development has been dead for nearly a decade now.
chat/hexchat is an actively maintained fork and features many bug and
security fixes and support for newer protocol features. Users of XChat
should migrate to HexChat, or rather, should have migrated several
years ago.
A blog post exists by HexChat's maintainer where Debian's packaging of
both is discussed:
https://blog.tingping.se/2018/03/02/when-distros-get-it-wrong.html
