Thursday, July 2, 2009

Pidgin 2.5.8 and Other Ramblings

Well, Casey already pointed out that we released Pidgin 2.5.8, but I thought I would expand on that a bit.

As everyone reading this knows already, Yahoo was broken for us briefly. We rushed out a 2.5.7 release to address the problem and after release discovered that we had a number of other problems. Among these were broken file transfers, broken buddy icons, etc.

We were receiving almost as many complaints about buddies never changing to show as offline as we got about the original Yahoo connection problem. Quite frankly, I got tired of it, so I started grabbing additional changes that we had committed to the upcoming 2.6.0 and applying them to 2.5.7. Eventually this yielded 2.5.8, which turned out to take a lot longer than I expected to get released.

As the ChangeLog indicates, we fixed a bunch of stuff, including an ICQ crash, an MSN crash for users with long buddy lists, a Yahoo crash introduced in 2.5.7, as well as receiving messages from the web version of MySpace IM and signing on to MySpace IM if you have an empty buddy list.

If you're not using Pidgin 2.5.8, upgrade!

We're also busily at work on Pidgin 2.6.0. In recent weeks we've come down to just a few things holding up the release. Among the blockers are the merging of some new features and fixing a new crash that we introduced by fixing ther crashes. At this rate, we might actually get 2.6.0 out sometime this year!

On an unrelated side note, I was recruited to participate in a charity fundraiser for the Muscular Distrophy Association. If anyone would like to help me reach my fundraising goal, I'd appreciate it.