Keep up to date with all things Pidgin, Finch and libpurple
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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:
Pidgin:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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. Thus we quickly ran a bunch of static analysis tools and patched everything we could find.
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.
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.
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.
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!), something that we are certainly very happy to see and hope you are as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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”.
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.
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.