Difference between revisions of "Pidgin"

From Jon's Wiki
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* Use [[Prosody]] to run your own XMPP (jabber) server, it's easy.
 
* Use [[Prosody]] to run your own XMPP (jabber) server, it's easy.
* Use Conversations on your [[Android]] gadget.
+
* Use Conversations on your [[Android]] gadget, or [https://chatsecure.org/ ChatSecure] on your Apple gadget.

Revision as of 23:30, 19 May 2017

Pidgin is a multi-protocol IM client for Windows and *nix desktops (see Adium for Mac). Pidgin 2.x series is woefully crap in many technical ways, but mostly does what it says on the tin. Development on 2.x has been in maintenance mode since about 2011, and most dev effort is focused on the 3.0 branch, which is pretty much a ground-up rewrite.

Missing XMPP XEPs

XMPP support in Pidgin has been slow to adopt new shiny XMPP extensions (XEP). Tickets exist for them:

Here are instructions on how to fix them.

XEP-0280: Message Carbons

There's now a Pidgin 2.x plugin.

XEP-0313: Message Archive Management

This is the bit that lets the server stash messages sent to you while you're offline, and the client to sync the history when next online, also like Hangouts. Especially useful for multiuser chatrooms. A patch potentially exists in the meantime. Pidgin 2.x is limited in its ability to store information on disk (unencrypted plain text, pretty much) which precludes implementing MAM without also implementing SQLite databases and so on.

XEP-384: OMEMO Encryption

OMEMO is now an XEP marked experimental, and there's now a Pidgin 2.x plugin.

Facebook, Hangouts, and Steam

These protocols used to be XMPP-based, but because nobody seems to understand how to implement it properly, and the XEP standards body can't be bothered progressing draft standards that have been in use for years, they have been replaced by proprietary protocols, and there are now plugins for them for libpurple:

These just involve running make and lobbing the .so into your ~/.purple/plugins directory; see their respective README files for installation instructions. You will need Google protobuffers and GLib JSON libraries too:

sudo apt-get install libprotobuf-c1 libjson-glib-1.0-0

See also

  • Use Prosody to run your own XMPP (jabber) server, it's easy.
  • Use Conversations on your Android gadget, or ChatSecure on your Apple gadget.