Pidgin 3.x is using a proper secret store:
https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/KeyringSupport.html
Yes! This is great news.
replies(1):
Yes! This is great news.
Since then I've used that experience to exemplify who I never want to become and how I never want to treat people.
So thanks. Bad experiences can help you become a better person.
PS: shoutout to Daniel Reed (rpidan) who did an Ncurses naim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naim_(software) // https://github.com/jwise/naim) from back then. He was a genuine upstanding guy. Naim in long running screen sessions that I'd log into from text terminals at the library to chat with friends over AIM - good times.
Also, meebo... Basically libpurple over 2005 era AJAX. I even made a super minimal HTTP forms based client I could use over flip phones in the early 2000s. It was optimized for T9N and per/KB metered data plans. Never really publicized it. Probably still have the code somewhere.
I did some digging and have been able to find basically everything. I'm keeping it to myself. No dirty laundry here.
Also if pidgin could magically combine slack, messenger, telegram, discord, and Whatsapp in a single reasonable app ... It'd be a return to the glory days. The current state of half a dozen web apps is such a pain. Just text chat. Nothing fancy.
What a dream...
My pride and joy was the Adium theme support (which was resurrected from another rejected patch) https://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=search&cat_id=5&sort=...
I suppose for now I may stick to Gajim (and Conversations on Android).
Nowadays we use zulip at work which has a better model (topics). For IRC I use quassel because I can have the backend running on a server and when I connect using the frontend I see the channel history and messages I might have received weeks ago...
I use this ansible role to deploy it: https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/
On one hand, it's great Pidgin is still alive and thriving like this. I have plenty of memories using it to talking with friends, people from uni, crushes, etc. And it had tons of cool funny plugins - I used to use one that let you change your profile pic from several from a given directory, sort of like how a "wallpaper slideshow" thing works. Do try to do that now with Whatsapp/Telegram/Signal/Slack/whatever...
On the other hand, the thing I always complain about - the state od IM right now is absolutely miserable thanks to all those walled gardens that force you to use their shitty client "apps" because of "privacy" or "features" or whatever, so you end having to use a bunch of different "apps" to talk with different people. It's insane.
It was a long long time again.
Good memories.
pidgin and adium were my dream apps for a long time.
I hate to have different apps for similar stuff and I also prefer "native" clients over web UIs so I used pidgin a lot in my life. I impressed many people with its "telepathic" feature that would open a chat when someone starts typing, to let you type in something before they even finish their initial sentence. Fun times…
However, when I finally got a smartphone, and started a more conventional line of work which came with extra devices, I switched to grouping my chats using server-side gateways for better multi-device consistency. I started by using Spectrum [1] which leverages on libpurple (pidgin's "backend") to do that. Since spectrum is on life support (maintenance mode, no modern chat features like emoji reactions which I happen to like despite my old age), I actually started my own hobby project [2], because I'm not really interested in learning C++ (which spectrum is written in). (shameless plug, I know)
The hype these days is more around mautrix [3], but the permacomputing enthusiasth in me prefers XMPP over Matrix. I'm not that religious about it though, my gateway project includes the most feature-rich XMPP/Matrix gateway out there [4] which I try to improve and maintain when time and motivation allow it. Unfortunately, XMPP support in pidgin has historically been pretty poor and IMHO partly responsible for some of the hate XMPP gets. I'm not blaming the pidgin devs of course, I should contribute to libpurple-xmpp (if that's how it's called) instead of complaining. ^^
[1] https://spectrum.im/ [2] https://sr.ht/~nicoco/slidge [3] https://github.com/mautrix/ [4] https://git.sr.ht/~nicoco/matridge
I understand that the Pidgin community is small, so claiming that "the other protocols will eventually be supported" seems unrealistic. This change requires the community to take on unnecessary porting work and we are already dealing with constant protocol changes, playing whack-a-mole with protocol providers.
For instance, this guy [1] is doing incredible work, but I doubt he will want to invest his time in unnecessary rewrites unless someone steps in to assist with each plugin.
The pidgin project is 25 years old, and libpurple is 17 years old. It's entirely fair that a rework is required, and much appreciated that this work is continuing.
And this is not "implementation detail stuff", by design serving Matrix is resource-hungry, while serving XMPP is very lightweight. Others have phrased it better than me, something along the lines of:
> Matrix is a distributed, eventually consistent database; XMPP is just message passing.
Both have their own merits.
But you know all of that Arathorn ;). I'm replying for readers anyway.
[1] https://decentim.grafana.net/public-dashboards/92602d3a4aa84...
So at a bare minimum we needed to totally change the way messages work. Which inside of a chat client, is a pretty big change. That obviously led to other changes and so on and so on.
As for the other protocols... We needed something to prove out most of the abstractions and trying to prove out abstractions while implementing multiple protocols is a ton of work. But on our radar are new XMPP, Bonjour, and even a Matrix plugin. All of these will be coming from us and will be in tree.
That said, there will not be any proprietary protocols in our official source tree. If you want more information on that, check out this post [1].
As for Eion's plugins, I've been talking to him through much of this as you would expect. Obviously his time is precious and we didn't make this changes to spite him or anything, but we (me specifically) have offered to start porting his protocols for him.
I cleaned up the language on the irc bit in the post as it was confusing people. But we are very much aiming to support everything including all the big chat networks. That's why so much of our internal API had to change.
This release is to get something out there even with limited functionality rather than not releasing until it's at feature parity with Pidgin 2.x which is going to take a long time on our current trajectory.