2.14.0 Released!

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

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