Keep up to date with all things Pidgin, Finch and libpurple
2021-09
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Notice for Windows users: We are aware of an issue with the installer failing to download the dictionaries used for spellchecking. We are currently working on a fix and hope to have this resolved as soon as possible.
Yet another minor version of Pidgin has been released, 2.14.7. This release includes a bunch of random fixes for issues that were found by Google OSS-Fuzz.
As far as we can tell, none of these issues are remotely exploitable, but you should update for the memory leak fixes alone.
Thu, Sep 16, 2021
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Well it’s September now, which means that the Google Summer of Code has ended. If you missed our announcement post earlier this year you can find it over here.
James Culver worked on the History API which is key to our future support of such features as message editing, message reactions, read/delivery receipts, server side history, reactions, etc. The work James has done is currently up for review and will hopefully be merged in the very near future.
Mon, Sep 13, 2021
2021-07
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Notice for Windows users: We are aware of an issue with the installer failing to download the dictionaries used for spellchecking. We are currently working on a fix and hope to have this resolved as soon as possible.
Yet another minor version of Pidgin has been released, 2.14.6. This release took a bit longer than we hoped but it’s here now so check it out!
The complete changelog for this release is the following:
Fri, Jul 9, 2021
2021-06
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We recently released Pidgin 2.14.5 and mentioned in that post that we changed the default IRC network in Pidgin from Freenode to Libera.chat. We’ve also posted on Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook that we established #pidgin on Libera.chat and aim to meet our users “wherever they may flock.” As part of those posts we said we were monitoring the ongoing situation, implying that we would take whatever we felt would be appropriate action when necessary.
Wed, Jun 16, 2021
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Introduction Developing Pidgin 3 can be quite complicated and error prone. Compilation and installation takes a long time and even running an additional instance can be a painful as there are currently two command line arguments that need to be set to make it work.
To make all of this work we use a number of scripts. In fact you may even have seen some of them in use on grim’s stream.
Wed, Jun 9, 2021
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We recently noticed an issue with version 5.8 of Mercurial after it got deployed on keep.imfreedom.org that causes freshly cloned repositories to be in a bad state.
As of right now we believe this is only affecting the main Pidgin repository. Our repository has 20+ years of history and has been converted from CVS to Subversion to Monotone and finally to Mercurial. Almost none of those conversions happened without issue, some more than others.
Tue, Jun 8, 2021
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Notice for Windows users: We are aware of an issue with the installer failing to download the dictionaries used for spellchecking. We are currently working on a fix and hope to have this resolved as soon as possible.
Whoops we missed May, but hopefully you all enjoy this kind of rushed release!
Why was it rushed? Well a certain unnamed broker of software vulnerabilities posted a bounty for vulnerabilities in Pidgin.
Thu, Jun 3, 2021
2021-05
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As many of you may know, Pidgin was accepted into the Google Summer of Code for 2021. We’ve been accepted to the Summer of Code several times before, and were in fact one of the projects accepted in the very first Summer of Code.
You can find our project listing on the Summer of Code site here. Scroll down to the bottom for the projects.
This year we were given two student slots for projects.
Sun, May 23, 2021
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In a recent post we talked about our current infrastructure hosting sponsorship, but we’ve had another hosting provider that has provided us a dedicated physical server for almost nine years. That provider is Steadfast Networks, who has been a silent but very important piece of our infrastructure.
In June 2012, a now-retired Pidgin developer who worked for Steadfast talked to his boss and secured us a dedicated physical server for free.
Tue, May 18, 2021
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Over the last couple of years, Pidgin, and by extension our non-profit corporation called Instant Messaging Freedom, Inc., has received sponsorship from a hosting company called DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean provides a variety of hosting services, including virtual private servers, managed kubernetes clusters, and so on. They also provide sponsorship for open source projects, whereby they provide credits to use to offset the costs of their services.
This sponsorship has been the source of Pidgin and Instant Messaging Freedom’s primary infrastructure.
Fri, May 7, 2021
2021-04
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Notice for Windows users: We are aware of an issue with the installer failing to download the dictionaries used for spellchecking. We are currently working on a fix and hope to have this resolved as soon as possible.
Another minor version of Pidgin has been released, 2.14.4. It has been many years since we were able to get three releases out to our users in such a short amount of time (less than a month!
Thu, Apr 29, 2021
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After releasing Pidgin 2.14.2 some of our users which run Pidgin on Windows reached out to us about them having issues with the installer. This release takes care of this issue that affected Windows builds of Pidgin.
Also, this release removes the AIM protocol plugin. This is certainly an interesting change considering that the Pidgin project started as a chat client for AIM, yet it’s important to remember that AIM was shutdown in December 2017 so this removal was long overdue.
Thu, Apr 8, 2021
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Notice for Windows users: After releasing version 2.14.2 some users reached out to us about having issues with the Windows installer for 2.14.2. We are currently investigating the issue and expect to have a 2.14.3 release out soon which fixes it.
A new minor version of Pidgin has been released, 2.14.2. Amongst other changes we can highlight the fix for two issues related to pasting content with <p> or <hr> HTML tags.
Thu, Apr 1, 2021
2021-03
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Greetings Programs!
We’ve been trying to find a way to drive XMPP adoption a bit more, so we decided to spin up a limited access public XMPP server for interacting with the Pidgin community.
Unfortunately, this service will not allow you to reach the greater XMPP network as we’re not trying to run a hosted chat network as we frankly just do not have the time and resources to do that.
Mon, Mar 8, 2021
2021-02
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Today we released a minor version of libgnt, version 2.14.1. This release bumps the minimum required meson version from 0.37.0 to 0.41.0 and fixes an issue where a string could have been truncated.
You can find the released files on SourceForge and the official ChangeLog over here.
Thu, Feb 4, 2021
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Today JFrog announced that they will be sunsetting Bintray. You can read the announcement here.
Overall this doesn’t affect us too much, but this does mean that we will be relying on SourceForge for our downloads going forward. Also, we have updated previous articles that were pointing to Bintray to mention this update.
A few ideas have been thrown around like using IPFS, but due to our current timelines we can’t afford to spend a lot of time investigating and deploying new solutions.
Thu, Feb 4, 2021
2020-06
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Updated 2021-02-04 to strike out Bintray mentions as they have announced that they are sunsetting it. See Bintray Sunsetting
So who would have guessed that some stuff would go wrong when we haven’t released in nearly two years?
The changes for 2.14.1 are small but important. There were some issues with the Windows installer that made it impossible to install 2.14.0 and the Mercurial revision in the About box was displaying “unknown”.
Thu, Jun 11, 2020
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Updated 2021-02-04 to strike out Bintray mentions as they have announced that they are sunsetting it. See Bintray Sunsetting
Well it’s been a while, but we’ve finally released Pidgin 2.14.0. This is a special release for a number of reasons, which we’ll get into below. That said, you can find the source release on SourceForge as well as on Bintray.
First of all we moved libgnt, the GLib NCurses Toolkit, to its own repository.
Wed, Jun 10, 2020
2020-01
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Greetings, Programs!
We’re excited to announce the launch of our brand new website. The new site aims to bring the old website and the wiki from developer.pidgin.im into a single website. Development has been led by Jason Allan who is a new contributor to the project.
We haven’t transfered everything over yet, so if you’re looking for something and the search isn’t being helpful, all of the old content is still available at old and developer.
Tue, Jan 14, 2020