Blog on Pidgin, the universal chat client

Migrating to Discourse

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:20:34 -0600

Greetings everyone! As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there hasn’t been a lot of activity here lately… But that doesn’t mean we haven’t been active, we’ve just moved all the posting over to our Discourse.

We haven’t mentioned this here yet because well we couldn’t. This site highly customized a now abandoned hugo theme that is now incompatible with modern hugo. So I finally sat down and got it somewhat working. You’ve probably found something that’s broken, and if so, please let me know, but we’re planning on redoing this site at some point anyways.

Anyways, if you’re interested in our updates you can find all news items via the news tag or you can add it to your RSS reader with this link. Like wise, all releases are tagged with the release tag which can also be added to your RSS reader with this link.

This will be the last post here but we hope to see you all over on our Discourse instance!

Malicious Plugin

Thu, 22 Aug 2024 16:00:02 -0500

Greetings everyone. It is with much regret that I am writing this post. A plugin, ss-otr, was added to the third party plugins list on July 6th. On August 16th we received a report from 0xFFFC0000 that the plugin contained a key logger and shared screen shots with unwanted parties.

We quietly pulled the plugin from the list immediately and started investigating. On August 22nd Johnny Xmas was able to confirm that a keylogger was present.

If you happened to install this plugin, you will want to uninstall it immediately.

It went unnoticed at the time that the plugin was not providing any source code and was only providing binaries for download. Going forward, we will be requiring that all plugins that we link to have an OSI Approved Open Source License and that some level of due diligence has been done to verify that the plugin is safe for users.

2.14.13 Released!

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 05:47:11 -0600

We’ve released another bug fix release for Pidgin 2! We’re trying to get more of this stuff on our Discourse server, so check out the full announcement over there!!

State of the Bird 2023 Q4

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 21:56:16 -0600

We are pleased to announce that our next State of the Bird will be held on February 9th, 2024 at 02:00 UTC. You can use this link to get the time in your time zone.

The State of the Bird is a quarterly update on what has been happening in the world of Pidgin, Finch, and libpurple. The event will be held live on Gary’s Twitch.tv Channel. The presentation is scheduled for roughly one hour and will be followed by a question and answer session.

During the event you can ask a question at any time by typing !ask <the text of your question> into chat and it will be queued up for the question and answer session.

If you’re unable to make it, the presentation as well as the question and answer session will be posted on Gary’s YouTube Channel as soon as it is available.

Previous States of the Bird can be found in this YouTube playlist.

Hope to see you there!

State of the Bird 2023 Q3

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 23:14:36 -0500

We are pleased to announce that our next State of the Bird will be held on November 10th, 2023 at 02:00 UTC. You can use this link to get the time in your time zone.

During the event you can ask a question at any time by typing !ask <the text of your question> into chat and it will be queued up for the question and answer session.

If you’re unable to make it, the presentation as well as the question and answer session will be posted on Gary’s YouTube Channel as soon as it is available.

Previous States of the Bird can be found in this YouTube playlist.

Hope to see you there!

Facebook Republished

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 04:11:59 -0500

This is a follow up to the previous post about Facebook taking down our page. It’s a bit late as I’ve been busy with other things, so apologies for that.

So on Wednesday August 9th I received an email from Facebook saying our page has been published again! Hooray!

So we’re all done right? Yes, but there’s an interesting story here and we’ve gotten the okay to talk about it, so lets do just that!

As you may have noticed, Gary tried to find help with this all over. His blog, Facebook, X/Twitter, Mastodon, even LinkedIn among other methods. However, a retired Pidgin developer, Ethan, reached out to a contact he had at Meta and that’s when things actually started happening.

His contact let us know that the page got taken down because Meta had just started up a new AI model whose purpose is to help them find and take down pages posing as Meta properties. Since the title of our page is Pidgin Instant Messenger it got auto taken down by the AI due to the use of Messenger and was never looked at by a human reviewer.

The contact went ahead and filed an internal appeal to the page being unpublished. Once reviewed by a human, it was very clear that we were not impersonating a Meta property, so Meta went ahead an republished the page. They also added our page to their seed set/corpus so it should not be taken down again in the future for impersonation.

Luckily this story had a happy ending, but it seems like that only happened because we had contacts inside of Meta that could push things along. At any rate, this is a good case for showing that AI is only as good as its input.

Facebook Takedown

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 19:55:30 -0500

I opened Facebook today to see an interesting notification.

Apparently we are misrepresenting ourselves as the official Facebook page for ourselves. I appealed the decision and they upheld their decision which can be seen below.

I’ve been unable to find a method for how we can prove who we are but maybe this post will do it? I reached out via the Meta Business Manager but I’m not holding my breath there.

We only have about 1,700 followers on our Facebook page, and I do end up supporting users there every few months. If the page is gone for good, it’s one less thing I need to check and post to which is good for me, but it sucks for the users that were using it.

Either way, time will tell what’s going to happen here, but if you have any suggestions, please reach out on our Discourse post for this issue.

State of the Bird 2023 Q2

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 22:08:25 -0500

We are pleased to announce that our next State of the Bird will be held on July 28th, 2023 at 01:00 UTC. You can use this link to get the time in your time zone.

During the event you can ask a question at any time by typing !ask <the text of your question> into chat and it will be queued up for the question and answer session.

If you’re unable to make it, the presentation as well as the question and answer session will be posted on Gary’s YouTube Channel as soon as it is available.

Previous States of the Bird can be found in this YouTube playlist.

Hope to see you there!

State of the Bird 2022 Q4

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 19:25:06 -0600

We are pleased to announce that our next State of the Bird will be held on January 19th, 2023 at 20:00 UTC. You can use this link to get the time in your time zone.

During the event you can ask a question at any time by typing !ask <the text of your question> into chat and it will be queued up for the question and answer session.

If you’re unable to make it, the presentation as well as the question and answer session will be posted on Gary’s YouTube Channel as soon as it is available.

Previous States of the Bird can be found in this YouTube playlist.

Hope to see you there!

2.14.12 Released!

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 21:36:21 -0600

We’ve released another bug fix version of Pidgin, version 2.14.12. This release has many random bug fixes so be sure to check out the full ChangeLog below.

You may have noticed we didn’t announce 2.14.11, that’s because this release got spiked as there was an error with a translation with the Windows installer. I tested building the installer before merging translations which was a mistake that I’ll try to avoid in the future.

You can find links to the download from our Install page.

2.14.12

General:

Remove a string from the Romanian translation that’s breaking iconv on Windows. (Review 2157) (Gary Kramlich)

2.14.11

General:

Add Markus “ivanhoe” Fischer to the Crazy Patch Writers! Congrats Markus! (Review 1952) (Gary Kramlich)
Fix a crash when closing a group chat with spellchk plugin enabled. (Review 1951) (Markus Fischer)
Fix network interface detection on Windows to fix broken file transfers. (PIDGIN-17123, PIDGIN-17293, PIDGIN-17516, PIDGIN-17704) (Review 2018) (Gary Kramlich)
Update the about box to point people to Discourse instead of the mailing lists. (Review 2154) (Gary Kramlich)

State of the Bird 2022 Q3

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 10:00:32 -0500

We are pleased to announce that our next State of the Bird will be held on October 20th, 2022 at 20:00 UTC. You can use this link to get the time in your time zone.

During the event you can ask a question at any time by typing !ask <the text of your question> into chat and it will be queued up for the question and answer session.

If you’re unable to make it, the presentation as well as the question and answer session will be posted on Gary’s YouTube Channel as soon as it is available.

Previous States of the Bird can be found in this YouTube playlist.

Hope to see you there!

DigitalOcean Sponsorship Renewed

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 07:25:02 -0500

DigitalOcean has graciously renewed their support of Pidgin for another year! Without their sponsorship we wouldn’t be the independent project that we are today!

We run just about every one of our services on their Managed Kubernetes. All of which are configured via kustomize and are available for your auditing or learning needs at keep.imfreedom.org/imfreedom/k8s-cluster!

As for our other services, well those are just running on a normal DigitalOcean Droplet. Those configurations are available as an Ansible playbook as well at keep.imfreedom.org/imfreedom/ansible!

DigitalOcean has been a great partner with a great product! If you’d like to give them a try, feel free to use our referral link.

State of the Bird 2022 Q2

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 20:17:46 -0500

We are pleased to announce that our next State of the Bird will be held on July 21st, 2022 at 20:00 UTC. You can use this link to get the time in your time zone.

During the event you can ask a question at any time by typing !ask <the text of your question> into chat and it will be queued up for the question and answer session.

If you’re unable to make it, the presentation as well as the question and answer session will be posted on Gary’s YouTube Channel as soon as it is available.

Previous State of the Birds can be found in this YouTube playlist.

Hope to see you there!

2.14.10 Released!

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 21:39:19 -0500

We’ve released another bug fix version of Pidgin, version 2.14.10. This release has many random bug fixes so be sure to check out the full ChangeLog below.

You can find links to the download from our Install page.

General:

Audit and correct the COPYRIGHT file. (Review 1425) (Richard Laager)
Fix a spelling error in a debug message for proxies. (Review 1426) (Richard Laager)
Install some emojis already in the theme but not being installed. (Review 1428) (Richard Laager)
Drop the QQ smileys as we don’t ship QQ anymore. (PIDGIN-14385) (Review 1429) (Richard Laager)
Modernize the desktop file. (Review 1433) (Richard Laager)
Modernize the appdata file. (Review 1431) (Richard Laager)
Make privacy settings persist. (PIDGIN-17137) (Review 1463) (Belgin Știrbu)

Pidgin:

Fix a use after free that was introduced in 2.14.9. (Review 1488) (ivanhoe)

IRC:

Fix a crash if the server sends a short form JOIN message. (PIDGIN-17375) (Review 1484) (Belgin Știrbu)

XMPP:

Fix a regression from 2.14.9 where XMPP accounts state would get lost after failing to connect. (PIDGIN-17621) (Review 1455) (Belgin Știrbu)
Fix a crash when requesting your own info in an XMPP conference. (Review 1465) (Belgin Știrbu)
Fix hang when completing a file transfer over XMPP. (Review 1466) (Belgin Știrbu)
Fix updating custom smileys. (PIDGIN-17153) (Review 1477) (Belgin Știrbu)
Fix unblocking users. (PIDGIN-16414) (Review 1479) (Belgin Știrbu)
Fix a crash when cancelling a file transfer. (PIDGIN-17189) (Review 1485) (Belgin Știrbu)

Google Talk Shutdown

Mon, 16 May 2022 17:16:43 -0500

As of 2022-06-16 Google is shutting down third party client access to Google Talk. This has been in the works for a long time and is expected. Unfortunately they did not provide a time nor a time zone, so who knows exactly when it’s going to be shut down…

If you would like to continue talking to your Google Contacts you’ll need to migrate to purple-googlechat from Eion Robb.

If you have any questions or comments please reach out to us however you usually do or see our contact page.

2.14.9 Released!

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 05:21:11 -0500

We’ve released another bug fix version of Pidgin, version 2.14.9. This release has many random bug fixes so be sure to check out the full ChangeLog below.

Items to note are that the dictionary downloads in the Windows installer have finally been fixed, as well as IRC file transfers on Windows.

There is a minor security fix as well that was fixed by removing our support for the _xmppconnect DNS TXT record which has been deemed insecure for a very long time.

You can find links to the download from our Install page.

Security:

Remove _xmppconnect support. (Review 1357) (CVE-2022-26491) (Gary Kramlich)

libpurple:

Fix a GLib CRITICAL message with typing time outs. (Review 1123) (Mohammed Sadiq)
Fix an issue where the unit tests for purple_str_to_time would fail. (GENTOO-819774) (Review 1238) (Gary Kramlich)

Pidgin:

Fix a memory leak in pidgin_conversations_set_tab_colors. (Review 1244) (ivanhoe)
Fixed the majority of the infinite resizing issues in the input box. (PIDGIN-16753, PIDGIN-16999, PIDGIN-17287, PIDGIN-17413, PIDGIN-17430, PIDGIN-17568, PIDGIN-17602) (Review 1342) (Belgin Știrbu)
Add transient-buddy back which is used to show some context menus and other things. (PIDGIN-17523) (Review 1381) (Belgin Știrbu)

Windows:

Fix the download of dictionaries in the Windows installer. (PIDGIN-14618, PIDGIN-15648, PIDGIN-15540, PIDGIN-14612, PIDGIN-14893) (Review 1303) (Gary Kramlich)

Translations:

Fix a typo in the German translations. (PIDGIN-17575) (Review 1242) (ivanhoe)
Synced all of the translations with Transifex.

IRC:

Fix IRC file transfers on Windows. (PIDGIN-17175) (Review 1382) (Belgin Știrbu)
Fix file transfers failing at 99% on IRC. (PIDGIN-15893) (Review 1385) (Belgin Știrbu)
Default realname and ident name in IRC to the username (nickname) of the account. (PIDGIN-17610) (Review 1386) (Belgin Știrbu)
Add an advanced account option to IRC accounts for explicitly setting the SASL login name. (PIDGIN-15451) (Review 1388) (Belgin Știrbu)
Added a rate limiter that should make it impossible to excess flood. (Review 1391) (Gary Kramlich)

SIMPLE:

Fix an issue with the CSeq numbers in SIMPLE. (PIDGIN-9675) (Review 1379) (dohmniq)

XMPP:

Fix XMPP attention messages being sent to incorrect JIDs. (PIDGIN-14714) (Review 1387) (itsnotabigtruck, Belgin Știrbu)

State of the Bird 2022 Q1

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 07:13:18 -0500

We are pleased to announce that our next State of the Bird will be held on April 28th, 2022 at 20:00 UTC. You can use this link to get the time in your time zone.

During the event you can ask a question at any time by typing !ask <the text of your question> into chat and it will be queued up for the question and answer session.

If you’re unable to make it, the presentation as well as the question and answer session will be posted on Gary’s YouTube Channel as soon as it is available.

Previous State of the Birds can be found in this YouTube playlist.

Hope to see you there!

Libera Wallops

Sat, 05 Feb 2022 05:32:26 -0600

Introduction

In December of 2021 libera.chat made a decision to turn on wallops by default for all users. The Pidgin project has no stance on this change, but a few users have asked us how to disable it.

Unfortunately there isn’t a way to do this in a stock Pidgin install, but the IRC More plugin in the Purple Plugin Pack is up to the task.

Installation

The Purple Plugin Pack has been around for a very long time so it’s probably already available to you in the usual way that you install packages.

For Windows users, you can download a zip file of all the plugins from here. To complete installation please see the README.txt inside of the zip file.

Enable The Plugin

Once you have the plugin installed you will need to enable it in the Plugins Dialog via the Tools -> Plugins menu item in the Buddy List window. You don’t need to restart Pidgin as it will check for new plugins when you open the Plugins Dialog.

Scroll down until you find IRC More and check the box to enable the plugin.

Enable irc-more plugin

Once the IRC More plugin is enabled you can close the Plugins Dialog.

Configuration

Each IRC account is configured independently, so you’ll need to open the Account Edit Dialog for your Libera.chat account. There’s number of ways to do this, but the easiest is to select the Accounts -> Manage Accounts menu item in the Buddy List window.

With the Accounts dialog open, find your Libera.chat account and select it. Then click the Modify... button and you should be presented with a dialog similar to the one shown here.

IRC Account Basic Settings

Click on the Advanced tab at the top. This is where the IRC More plugin has added the additional settings.

In the Unset User Modes On Connect text box, we want to enter a single w. By entering this w we are telling the IRC More plugin to turn off the see wallops mode that is now turned on by default while connecting.

IRC Account Advanced Settings

You can now click on Save which will close the dialog. However, remember that IRC More only unsets that mode while connecting to that IRC account so it has not yet turned it off.

Verifying

The easiest way to verify that everything is setup correctly is to reconnect your Libera.chat account and verify that you no longer have that mode set. To do this, you can quickly disable and enable your Libera.chat account in the Accounts Window.

Verification is a little bit tricker as Pidgin doesn’t typically show these kinds of messages to users. So the first thing we need to do is open the Debug Window via the Help -> Debug Window menu item in the Buddy List window.

Once that’s open, find any conversation window in Pidgin that is from your Libera.chat account. Once you have found one, type /mode <your-username> into the input box of that conversation, replacing <your-username> with whatever your username is on Libera.chat. Be sure to hit enter to send the command.

Now back in the Debug Window you should see a new line like the following:

(06:21:14) irc: Unrecognized message: :calcium.libera.chat 221 grim-demo +Zi

This output says that the current user modes are Z and i which means this user was connected via TLS and will be hidden from who and whois commands from normal users.

Since there is no w that means we successfully disabled the see wallops mode, which means you are now done and can close the Debug Window!

Additional Reading

You can find more information about additional user modes on Libera.chat in their documentation.

State of the Bird 2021 Q4

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 12:14:17 -0600

We are pleased to announce that our next State of the Bird will be held on January 20th, 2022 at 20:00 UTC. You can use this link to get the time in your time zone.

During the event you can ask a question at any time by typing !ask <the text of your question> into chat and it will be queued up for the question and answer session.

If you’re unable to make it, the presentation as well as the question and answer session will be posted on Gary’s YouTube Channel as soon as it is ready.

Previous State of the Birds can be found in this YouTube playlist.

Hope to see you there!

2.14.8 Released!

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 04:31:20 -0500

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.

We’ve released another bug fix version of Pidgin, version 2.14.8. This release only has a few random bug fixes, but it does fix a regression that was causing some timestamp issues at least with the Discord plugin.

You can find links to the download from our Install page.

libpurple:

Fix a regression in purple_str_to_time. (PIDGIN-17552) (Review 931) (Gary Kramlich)

XMPP:

Fix a double free in jabber/message.c. (PIDGIN-17547) (Review 932) (Gary Kramlich, pv32768)

Pidgin:

Fix the link to the support mailing list archive in the About Dialog. (Review 929) (Gary Kramlich)

State of the Bird 2021 Q3

Thu, 07 Oct 2021 22:41:38 -0500

We are pleased to announce that our next State of the Bird will be held on October 14th, 2021 at 21:00 UTC. You can use this link to get the time in your time zone.

During the event you can ask a question at any time by typing !ask <the text of your question> into chat and it will be queued up for the question and answer session.

If you’re unable to make it, the presentation as well as the question and answer session will be posted on Gary’s YouTube Channel as soon as it is ready.

Hope to see you there!

2.14.7 Released!

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 21:19:59 -0500

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.

libpurple:

Fix leak in purple_markup_find_tag on error. (OSS-Fuzz 35816 ) (Review 924) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
Fix an issue where the XMPP utility tests would fail if libidn was disabled. (Review 922) (Gary Kramlich)
Fix an assert in purple_markup_html_to_xhtml (OSS-Fuzz 35029 ) (Review 921) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
Fix building on Haiku (Review 916) (Haiku Ports Team)
Correctly free parse tags at end of purple_html_to_xhtml (OSS-Fuzz 34996 ) (Review 913) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
Fix leak that may occur when xmlnode_from_str fails (OSS-Fuzz 34988 ) (Review 911) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
Cleanup, standardize and create starting corpora for all of the fuzzers. (Review 920) (Gary Kramlich)
Port purple_str_to_time to use a regular expression and add additional unit tests for it. (Review 923) (Gary Kramlich)

GSoC 2021 Retrospective

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 05:14:36 -0500

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.

Prateek Pardeshi worked on the Account Creation Assistant which is a guided assistant to help users add accounts to Pidgin. This is an important feature to make Pidgin more approachable to non-technical users who may be a bit lost in our current account creation user interface. Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances, Prateek was unable to complete this project.

We’re considering this year a success and will be applying to be a mentoring organization again next year.

We wish both James and Prateek the best in their future development work and hope to see them continue working in Open Source in the future!

2.14.6 Released!

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 03:13:12 -0500

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:

General:

Update references to point to our current websites. (Review 766) (Gary Kramlich)
Add a donate link to the help menu. (Review 749) (Gary Kramlich)

Finch:

Check pkg-config for ncurses before looking for it manually. (Review 729) (Justin Lecher)

Pidgin:

Replace newlines in topics with spaces. (PIDGIN-16704) (Review 730) (Gary Kramlich)

libpurple:

Added support for the no_proxy environment variable. (PIDGIN-17518) (Review 667) (Alynx Zhou and Gary Kramlich)
Added infrastructure for fuzzing as well as some initial fuzzers. (Review 760) (Jordy Zomer)
Fix an out of bounds write in purple_markup_linkify. (Review 781) (Thomas Roth, Dominik Maier, and Fabian Freyer)

XMPP:

Enable session management after binding a resource. (PIDGIN-17520) (Review 759) (defanor)

Zephyr:

Fix a clang logical-not-parentheses warning. (PIDGIN-17528) (Review 731) (Gary Kramlich)

IRC Network Changes

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 11:32:30 -0400

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.

Yesterday (2021-06-15), Freenode threw away its decades of history. All user and channel registrations were removed. All active connections to the “old” IRC infrastructure of Freenode were terminated, forcing everyone onto the “new” Freenode. As part of this, Pidgin developers’ nickname registrations and, in fact, #pidgin’s registration too, were lost. This is the ultimate outcome of what was described as a “hostile takeover” of the Freenode IRC network some weeks ago.

We have re-registered #pidgin on the new Freenode infrastructure and fully intend to maintain our presence on the new Freenode. However, as a result of these Freenode shenanigans and the overall general movement of the open source software community away from Freenode, we decided that we will now consider our presence on the Libera.chat network to be our “official” IRC presence. Additionally, we also registered #pidgin on the OFTC IRC network and are maintaining a presence there.

You will now notice that the IRC link on the side bar has been moved to our contact page and now points to Libera.chat’s web chat and that we’ve removed the Freenode links and information on our contact page. This is in keeping with our decision to make Libera.chat our “official” IRC presence.

We aren’t leaving Freenode as a project, although some people who used to be stalwart presences in #pidgin there may not be present anymore. We’re going to continue maintaining our presence there as long as the network is not hostile to our presence. We continue to aim to meet our users wherever they may flock.

Pidgin3 Development Scripts

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 01:26:16 -0500

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. But there’s one more piece to all of this and that is the installation prefix.

Prefixes

All projects that use autotools, cmake, meson, qmake, etc have what we call an installation prefix. It’s what tells the build system where to install the software. By default this is typically /usr/local which means your executables will end up in /usr/local/bin, your libraries in /usr/local/lib and so on.

Using the default is usually fine if you’re just running the software, but while developing the need might arise for you to delete everything that’s been installed. While all of these build systems include an uninstall target, there are times when you’ll update your local copy and not realize that installed files have been removed and they end up polluting your install prefix and can cause bugs that are very difficult to debug because there are files that are there that you’re not expecting.

To avoid this or having to run the uninstall target before every update we make it easy to delete everything by using a custom prefix. You’re free to use whatever prefix you like, but grim uses ~/l. The l is just an abbreviation of local and is less likely to be confused with ~/.local which is something completely different.

Using a custom prefix also makes it very easy to make sure we’re always building our subprojects of GPlugin, libgnt, and Talkatu. This is important because at the current stage of development these are being updated directly for Pidgin 3 and vice versa. This works because meson doesn’t add the prefix to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable so pkg-config is unable to find the installed copies of our subprojects and thus always builds them.

To set the prefix we pass it as an argument to meson during initial configuration via meson --prefix=~/l build or after the fact using meson configure --prefix=~/l from an existing build directory.

Scripts

Now that the prefix is setup we can start talking about the main developer scripts. They are dev-log-grep, dev-pidgin, local-pidgin, and dev-pidgin-glade.

dev-log-grep helps sort through the compiler output as there are currently many deprecation warnings that we’re slowing churning through.
dev-pidgin and local-pidgin are used to run Pidgin 3 from a build directory and a local installation respectively.
dev-pidgin-glade is used to create and edit our user interface templates in Glade.

These scripts need to be available on your PATH. Typically people put these in ~/bin or ~/.local/bin and will need to be added to your PATH environment variable via your shell’s initialization which is outside of the scope of this document.

dev-log-grep

dev-log-grep is a simple script that uses grep to ignore the deprecation warnings from the compiler output. However, it was built to run after the build. This works best when doing a clean build, that is running ninja clean before running ninja but that isn’t necessary. However, you need to slightly modify your ninja command to make this work. The ninja command you need to use is ninja |& tee log. This will run the build like normal, then you can use dev-log-grep to see the warnings that we aren’t ignoring.

The contents of dev-log-grep can be found below.

#!/bin/sh

grep -i warning log | grep -vi deprec | grep -vi "failed to parse" | grep -vi "bare structure or union" | grep -vi "callbacks cannot be return values" | grep -v "Unresolved type"

dev-pidgin

The dev-pidgin script is used to run Pidgin from your build directory. This is useful if you’re just testing something in libpurple or Pidgin directly, but if you’re working on plugins you’ll need to use local-pidgin which is explained later.

The contents of dev-pidgin are below. You can tweak them as necessary, but we’ll walk through what it does.

#!/bin/sh -e

TOOL="gdb --args"
#TOOL="valgrind --leak-check=full --suppressions=/usr/share/glib-2.0/valgrind/glib.supp --suppressions=/usr/share/gtk-3.0/valgrind/gtk.supp"

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=libpurple/:pidgin/

${TOOL} pidgin/pidgin3 \
	--gapplication-app-id=im.pidgin.dev \
	--config ~/.pidgin3-dev \
	--debug \
	${@}

The first line sets up our shell interpreter and tells it to exit on the first error it encounters. Lines 3 and 4 are an optional prefix we can use to run Pidgin 3 in either gdb or valgrind.

We use gdb for debugging and valgrind for finding memory leaks and other memory errors. The paths for the valgrind suppressions are distribution dependent and may not be available on distributions. The ones listed here are from a Debian system. Only one of these can be used at a time so just make sure to uncomment the one you would like to use.

Next we update LD_LIBRARY_PATH to tell the dynamic linker where to find the libraries that are part of our build. If you’re on macOS you’ll need to set DYLIB_LIBRARY_PATH instead.

Finally we have the command that will actually run Pidgin 3. It uses the prefix variable if defined, then specifies the pidgin3 executable to run. The --gapplication-app-id argument is used to uniquely identify this instance of Pidgin 3. This identifier is used to allow only one instance matching this identifier to run at a time.

The --config argument specifies where Pidgin 3 will store its configuration data. Next the --debug argument tells Pidgin to output all of the debug statements to the console. Finally ${@} will pass any arguments that were passed to dev-pidgin to be passed to the pidgin3 executable.

local-pidgin

local-pidgin is nearly identical to dev-pidgin so we won’t go into much depth as most of it is already covered above. The point of local-pidgin is to be able to run pidgin3 from an installed prefix that is not /usr or /usr/local. In the example below we have Pidgin 3 installed with a prefix of ~/l like we discussed earlier.

#!/bin/sh -e

TOOL="gdb --args"
#TOOL="valgrind --leak-check=full --suppressions=/usr/share/glib-2.0/valgrind/glib.supp --suppressions=/usr/share/gtk-3.0/valgrind/gtk.supp"

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/l/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu

${TOOL} ~/l/bin/pidgin3 \
	--gapplication-app-id=im.pidgin.local \
	--config ~/.pidgin3-local \
	--debug \
	${@}

Since this is for the installed version of Pidgin 3 we just need to point to everything for that installation. That means updating LD_LIBARY_PATH, or DYLIB_LIBRARY_PATH if you’re on macOS, as well as changing the path to the pidgin3 executable.

Finally we set a separate application id as well as configuration directory. These do not need to be different than the ones from dev-pidgin but if you want to run both instances for testing things this makes it easier.

dev-pidgin-glade

dev-pidgin-glade is the last of our development scripts. Its purpose is to allow developers to create and modify glade templates for Pidgin 3. This works by the use of a Glade catalog for the Pidgin widgets. However, in this intro we’re just going to cover how to edit templates for Pidgin 3 but not adding new widgets to the catalog.

This script is designed to be run from a Pidgin 3 build directory after Pidgin 3 has been built. This is necessary so that Glade can actually load the required libraries and catalogs.

#!/bin/sh

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=pidgin/:libpurple/:subprojects/talkatu/talkatu:subprojects/gplugin/gplugin-gtk/

export GLADE_CATALOG_SEARCH_PATH=pidgin/glade:subprojects/gplugin/gplugin-gtk:subprojects/talkatu/talkatu

glade ${@}

Like the other script here, this one sets up LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to the libraries in the build directory. Remember if you’re on macOS this needs to be DYLIB_LIBRARY_PATH.

Next, we tell Glade where to find the catalogs for Pidgin, GPluginGtk, and Talkatu all of which we are building and depend on.

With everything set up we can finally run Glade passing along any arguments that were passed to our script.

We hope you all found this information useful and we will keep this post updated in the future.

HGKeeper and Mercurial 5.8 Issue

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 23:29:09 -0500

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. Regardless to say our repository isn’t very pristine and this is not the first time we’ve broken a version control system.

We are still working with the amazing Mercurial team to figure out exactly what’s happening, but for the time being we rolled the version of Mercurial on keep.imfreedom.org back to version 5.7.1. We also recommend rolling back your client version back to 5.7.1 as we have been able to reproduce the issue with the server running 5.7.1 and the client running 5.8.

Most of the discussion around this has been in #mercurial on freenode, but we have opened an issue on Mercurial’s Bugzilla if you’re interested in keeping up to date on what’s going on. We will of course post an update here when we have everything figured out.

2.14.5 Released!

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 20:31:54 -0500

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. Thus we quickly ran a bunch of static analysis tools and patched everything we could find.

We have no reason to believe that 2.14.5 is any safer than 2.14.4 as the issues the static analysis found should not be exploitable. However, we didn’t want to take a chance and leave them in.

We also changed the default value of the Enable automatic router port forwarding preference from on to off. We suggest you disable this setting as well if you’re upgrading and you don’t typically send files directly to other users.

For the first time in a long time we updated our bundled TLS Certificates. This should hopefully avoid some certificate warnings for some users but there’s a good chance some third party protocol plugins users might still see them.

Finally, with all the events regarding the Freenode and Libera IRC networks, we decided to change the default IRC server from irc.freenode.net to irc.libera.chat. We will maintain a presence on both networks for as long as we have users there.

The complete changelog for this release is the following:

General:

Updated our bundled certificates to the latest version from Mozilla. (Review 722) (PIDGIN-17535) (Gary Kramlich)
Made the project scan-build clean. (Review 692, Review 693, Review 694, Review 695, Review 696, Review 697, Review 698. Review 699, Review 700, Review 701, Review 702, Review 703, Review 704, Review 705, Review 707, Review 708, Review 709, Review 710, Review 711, Review 712, Review 713, Review 714, Review 716, Review 717, Review 718, Review 719) (Gary Kramlich)
Fixed some of Gary’s scan-build fixes that were a bit verbose. (Review 715) (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
Disabled UPnP and NAT-PMP by default for new user. (Review 706) (Gary Kramlich)

IRC:

Changed the default server to irc.libera.chat. (Review 675) (Gary Kramlich)

Windows Specific Changes:

Fixed the installer not running when Mandatory ASLR was turned on. (Review 721) (PIDGIN-17524) (Gary Kramlich)

You can find 2.14.5 on SourceForge.

We hope everyone enjoys this release and the fixes it brings. Remember that if you have any questions or comments we have a variety of channels where you can reach out to us.

Gsoc 2021

Sun, 23 May 2021 15:30:37 -0400

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. We accepted the project proposals from James Culver and Prateek Pardeshi. Both students will be working on some major improvements to our currently in-development version 3.0.0. James will be working on a number of key improvements surrounding our message history functionality, and Prateek will be working on a replacement for our aging account management interface.

Our lead developer, Gary Kramlich, will be mentoring these two students, however there will be assistance from other members of the project as much as possible. It’s our hope that both students will excel in their projects and bring some much-needed modernization and improvement to our code base and improve our user experience significantly.

Join us over on PidginChat in the gsoc@conference.pidgin.im chat room if you’d like to follow the development activities this summer!

Thank You, Steadfast

Tue, 18 May 2021 23:33:29 -0400

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. The server was equipped with a quad-core Intel Core 2 Duo Q6600 2.4 GHz CPU, 8 GB RAM, and dual 250 GB SATA hard disks. Today these specs seem very modest, and even at the time they weren’t exactly the “top of the line,” but they were very impressive to a project whose existing infrastructure consisted of two virtual private servers with wildly inconsistent and underwhelming performance. After configuring the server to use the hard drives in a software RAID-1 array (Linux md), we moved our Trac issue tracking and wiki management system to this generously provided server.

When we first started using Trac in 2007, it displayed relatively reasonable performance. We were running it in an OpenVZ container-based virtual private server kindly donated by another hosting provider that is no longer in the hosting business. As the volume of traffic, ticket creation, wiki edits, and ticket comment activity on Trac grew, we began running into performance issues. At first, we ran Trac with mod_python in Apache, then moved to FastCGI in Apache. Guidance eventually became to run FastCGI in Lighttpd, so we did this for quite some time. As guidance later changed again, we migrated back to Apache, this time with WSGI. We also made a number of changes to the database that stored all the Trac data, which landed pretty quickly in PostgreSQL. We did end up making a number of tweaks to the database, all in the name of trying to improve performance.

So where does Steadfast come into that history exactly? Well, in June 2012, as we said earlier, but to be more specific, we had already made a bunch of the PostgreSQL database tweaks and were running Trac in Lighttpd with FastCGI at the time. And the move from the virtual private server to the real physical box was hugely beneficial to us.

Pretty much every instance of Trac that was Internet-accessible inevitably became a target for spammers. The spammers would flood tickets with comments containing lots of links to various websites with the goal of taking advantage of search indexing crawling the Trac content. In addition to needing to go back through all the added comments and delete the spam, we eventually reached a point where we had to implement anti-spam measures. The longer this battle went on, the harder it was for the virtual server to keep up. We could never have continued to run Trac with the influx of spam if Steadfast had not provided the physical server to us.

Equally important to us was the bandwidth Steadfast provided. They provided us a 100 megabit port and never limited our traffic. We never fully utilized that bandwidth for more than a few seconds at a time, but having it available was a huge benefit to us. The amount of traffic our Trac instance saw, plus the e-mail traffic Trac generated, was to us a substantial amount–an average of a few megabits per second for a lot of our time on that server. Admittedly, this would have been essentially nothing in the face of all the other traffic Steadfast handled, but it was major to us.

In the end, we were hosted on Steadfast’s network for just short of 9 years. If we had paid for this hosting out of pocket, it would have cost us several thousand dollars in that time. Thank you, Steadfast Networks, for being such a great host to us for so long!

DigitalOcean Sponsorship

Fri, 07 May 2021 23:30:30 -0400

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. Currently we run this website, our JetBrains Hub centralized authentication system (running at hub.imfreedom.org), our JetBrains YouTrack instance (running at issues.imfreedom.org), our Mercurial hosting solution, HGKeeper, that runs at keep.imfreedom.org, and a number of other tools and services all from the DigitalOcean-provided infrastructure. In the coming weeks and months, we will have all of our infrastructure, including e-mail and our previous bug tracking/wiki system, running entirely in DigitalOcean’s datacenters thanks to their generous sponsorship.

Why Self-Host?

We get a lot of people asking why we self-host when there are resources like the ubiquitous GitHub that would do a lot of the work for us. That’s a fair question, and admittedly we’re not always the most patient when answering. The answer is a bit longer than you’d initially expect.

Our Audience

First and foremost, Pidgin is an end-user application. Sure, we have lots of developers who use Pidgin, but our target audience is end users, not developers. End users who aren’t developers are going to find the user experience of a tool like GitHub, GitLab, or similar to be very lacking. In the current landscape, self-hosting is essentially the only way to get the end-user-facing aspects of our infrastructure to be as friendly as possible while still being relatively easy to maintain.

Repeatedly Burned, Always Cautious

For many years, we used SourceForge for our hosting needs. This included our ancient PHP-based website, our CVS source code hosting, issue tracking, mailing lists, and our downloads. SourceForge was, and still is, a gracious host that served us very well. Around the time we changed our name, we secured alternative hosting for much of those items because the SourceForge issue trackers were cumbersome and unwieldy and we wanted to move away from CVS and Subversion and toward distributed version control.

We migrated to Edgewall Trac for issue tracking and wiki management, and Monotone for version control. At the same time, since SourceForge couldn’t handle these tools, we migrated to a hosting provider that our friends at the Adium project were using. This provider donated hosting to Adium and agreed to donate hosting to us as well—in our case, two virtual private servers. That hosting provider exited the hosting business in 2020, after both Adium and Pidgin had been with them for well in excess of 10 years.

We also were using a binary hosting provider to host Continuous Integration artifacts and our releases as an alternative to SourceForge for those who still held animosity and distrust for SourceForge for actions under previous ownership and management. This hosting service has announced it is exiting from the hosting business in mid 2021.

However, the biggest blow to us was Atlassian BitBucket dropping Mercurial support. We had migrated to Mercurial after our time with Monotone proved that we needed a different version control tool. After that migration, in our development workflow for Pidgin 3.0.0, we had become dependent on the pull request workflow, issue tracking tools, and continuous integration system provided to us there. Fortunately, Atlassian had the courtesy to announce the removal of Mercurial support far enough in advance that Gary was able to write HGKeeper and get our repositories migrated away from BitBucket in time to prevent the loss of our repositories. (We have no desire to migrate to git and GitHub, GitLab, or similar, for reasons beyond the scope of this post.)

Most recently, just within the last few days a tool we were using to monitor our services, UptimeRobot, announced and then implemented severe curtailments to the functionality of their free monitoring offering. We were using UptimeRobot to monitor and alert on a variety of our infrastructure’s components and services; the changes to the free offering makes it no longer viable for us, thus we were forced to migrate to another tool.

All of these losses have made us rather wary of becoming too dependent on specialized hosting providers and services. We’re now much more inclined to build our own infrastructure in a generic, repeatable way that allows us to migrate to a new generalized hosting provider if we ever need to.

Why DigitalOcean?

Quite honestly, two reasons. First, they were the only hosting provider we knew of at the time which offered managed kubernetes clustering. Second, the Open Source project sponsorship. Gary, in particular, wanted the managed kubernetes functionality due to his previous experience with it. We became aware of the sponsorship later and it was essentially a bonus to us.

How Does Pidgin Use DigitalOcean?

Without getting too technical, we have five “Droplet” virtual private servers, four of which are a managed kubernetes cluster. The fifth will host our e-mail and mailing lists when we are able to sort out a few challenges. We also have a “small” load balancer (DigitalOcean’s term) to handle ingress into the various services running on the cluster, including spreading across multiple instances of a given service within the cluster.

Our aim is to run everything possible in the cluster, with all the configuration (except for secrets) well-defined and version-controlled. This allows us to have automatic service recovery in the event of a problem or a need to perform maintenance on one of the Droplets (such as upgrading to new kubernetes releases or container builds). Where possible, we also aim to run at least two instances of services within the cluster to provide a measure of high availability. For example, the container which serves this website runs on at least two nodes in the cluster at any given time and the load balancer will spread the traffic across all running instances of the container. If an instance has a failure, the load balancer stops sending traffic to that instance until the cluster recycles the container and resolves the problem. This is all fully automatic, with no need for human intervention. The cluster self-heals for the vast majority of container failures, which was a huge part of the appeal to us, especially Gary, due to limited time to deal with administration.

We’ve even moved our Trac instance, now read-only except to a select few long-time Pidgin developers, into the cluster to reduce the overall complexity of our hosting and allow another hosting provider to retire the aging dedicated physical server currently running Trac.

With the functionality built into the managed kubernetes clustering, TLS certificates, whether for HTTPS (web services), XMPP messaging, or any other TLS-capable service, are automatically managed. Using the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority and the integration into the clustering, all our TLS certificates are automatically issued, renewed, and replaced dynamically as needed with no intervention required.

Within the cluster we also run the website and the protocol documentation wiki for Instant Messaging Freedom, Inc. As mentioned before, Hub, YouTrack, and HGKeeper also run within the cluster, all in their own containers, along with some other tools that we aren’t yet able to make public.

Finally, we also run the Prosody IM XMPP server in the cluster. This service provides Pidgin and Instant Messaging Freedom, Inc. with instant messaging services over the XMPP protocol. It also provides the basis for the PidginChat service many of our users now enjoy.

Thank You!

In conclusion, the Pidgin project and Instant Messaging Freedom, Inc. would like to thank DigitalOcean for their generous sponsorship that allows us to continue to develop free and open source messaging software for the benefit of the entire world!

2.14.4 Released!

Thu, 29 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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!), something that we are certainly very happy to see and hope you are as well.

The complete changelog for this release is the following:

General:

Use LT_LIB_M to find the math library. This should simplify things for various distros including the BSD’s. (Review 608) (and, Justin Lechner)

libpurple:

Removed a dangling reference to oscar that was causing the unit tests to fail. (Review 605) (Gary Kramlich)
Update purple-remote and purple-url-handler to have a Python 3 shebang. (Review 609) (Richard Laager)

Pidgin:

Install our AppData file into the $prefix/share/metainfo. (Review 607) (Lars Wendler)
Re-enable the Gevolution plugin and set the evolution-data-server requirement to >= 3.6. (Review 610) (Ed Catmur, Lars Wendler)

Windows-Specific Changes:

Output pkg-config files so that our Windows builds can be seen by meson. Grim owes a blog post on how this works. (Review 615) (Gary Kramlich)
Update the debug symbols download in the installer to the inetc plugin. (Review 627) (Gary Kramlich)
Make sure the uninstaller removes all files that we install. (Review 612) (Gary Kramlich)

You can find 2.14.4 on SourceForge.

We hope everyone enjoys this release and the fixes it brings. Remember that if you have any questions or comments we have a variety of channels where you can reach out to us.

2.14.3 Released!

Thu, 08 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The complete changelog for this release is the following:

libpurple:

Removed the AIM protocol plugin. AIM has been shut down since December 15th of 2017. We left it around because of a third party server, but our plugin no longer works with it. (Review 598) (Gary Kramlich)

Windows:

Standardize on wprintf in pidgin/win32/winpidgin.c (Review 593) (Gary Kramlich)
Use the inetc nsis plugin that supports https (Review 593, Review 594) (PIDGIN-17511) (Gary Kramlich)
If building under msys2 copy libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll and libwinpthread to the install directory. (Review 593) (PIDGIN-17511) (Gary Kramlich)

You can find 2.14.3 on SourceForge.

We hope everyone enjoys this release and the fixes it brings. Remember that if you have any questions or comments we have a variety of channels where you can reach out to us.

2.14.2 Released!

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The complete changelog for this release is the following:

Fix a build issue when compiling with gstreamer but without voice and video. (Review 25)
Enable cyrus-sasl by default. (Review 26)
Fix an issue with opening link in Firefox. (Review 503) (PIDGIN-16589)
Fix a regression from 2.14.0 where extra whitespace would be displayed when pasting <p> elements from HTML. (Review 504) (PIDGIN-17437)
Require Python 3 for generating the D-Bus bindings. (Review 550)
Fix an issue where pasting <hr>’s and other HTML elements would eventually lead to a crash. (Review 514) (PIDGIN-17446)

You can find 2.14.2 on SourceForge.

We hope everyone enjoys this release and the fixes it brings. Remember that if you have any questions or comments we have a variety of channels where you can reach out to us.

Pidginchat

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 22:47:52 -0600

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.

You can find more information about this service at PidginChat.

libgnt 2.14.1 Released

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 22:55:01 -0600

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.

Bintray Sunsetting

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 22:13:17 -0600

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. If you would like to help in this regard please contact us!

2.14.1 Released!

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 04:48:05 -0500

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”.

Sorry for the inconvenience that this may have caused!

You can find 2.14.1 on SourceForge ~~as well as on Bintray~~.

2.14.0 Released!

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 04:05:23 -0500

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. It is the user interface library that was created for Finch. We did this for a number of reasons, most notably to let libgnt step out from Pidgin’s shadow and get the attention it deserves as a stand-alone project. That said, if you want to build Finch, you need to first install libgnt. You can find the source for it at SourceForge ~~or Bintray~~.

Secondly, this is most likely the last release that will be on Bitbucket. As many of you know, on July 1st Atlassian is deleting all Mercurial repositories. We are mostly done with migrating off of Bitbucket but there’s still some loose ends that need to be dealt with. Gary will be addressing this in an upcoming townhall-style meeting whose details will follow in the near future. In the meantime those loose ends need to be taken care of before that meeting. However, you can find the new home of the repository at keep.imfreedom.org/pidgin/pidgin.

Also due to the deletion of Mercurial repositories from Bitbucket we have added a new mirroring site for our downloads. We understand that many people still have trust issues with SourceForge but they are still the primary source for our files, which we do cryptographically sign. For those of you that still prefer another option we have started mirroring our downloads on Bintray. We will eventually be putting all of our previous releases there as well, but right now it just contains the files for the 2.14.0 release.

Finally, this release will be the last 2.x.0 release of Pidgin. What that means is that we will no longer be writing nor accepting new features into the Pidgin 2 code base. We are doing this to put all of our focus going forward on Pidgin 3. However, if there are bug fixes or security issues we will of course release Pidgin 2.14.1, 2.14.2, etc as necessary.

With that, I hope everyone enjoys the release and if you have any questions or comments please feel free to reach out to us.

–

Gary Kramlich

Nest Launch

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 02:55:01 +0000

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 transferred 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.pidgin.im.

We have a lot more going on in the near future so be sure to watch this section or subscribe to our RSS feed with your RSS aggregator of choice.

Finally, if you would like to contribute please see the contributing page.

–

Gary “grim” Kramlich