Michael McConville (mmcc, mmcco)

I'm a rising senior at Swarthmore College working as Pidgin's resident "Maintenance Hero" through the 2015 Google Summer of Code. My main goal is to help get our 3.0.0 release out the door. I also plan to work on voice and video and end-to-end encryption.

Contact

• Jabber: mmcc@jabber.at (OTR preferred)
• Email: mmcco ~a~ mykolab.com

What I'm working on

• Writing updates for the voice/video dependencies (libnice, Farstream, GStreamer) and submitting them to the ​Debian Telepathy maintainers
• XMPP Real-Time Text - ​XEP-0301 - #15674
• Removing the Crazy Chat plugin (#16667) and Yahoo! Japan (#15906)

Building Pidgin 3.0

Pidgin 3.0 has many dependencies, including some new ones and some that are a little tricky to get set up properly. Below are notes and suggestions on how to reliably build Pidgin 3.0. Don't take them as gospel - this is simply what I've done to make the builds work reliably.

I've been doing my dev work on Ubuntu 15.04 (the most recent release at the moment). Because of that, much of the information below is OS-specific. However, the dependencies' Debian and Ubuntu packages are often very similar or even identical, and the two OSs make up a large share of our user base. Obviously, compatible versions of all dependencies are going to have to be available in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories before 3.0 can be effectively shipped.

All commentary on package versions is from early June 2015.

I install all manually compiled packages into the prefix $HOME/env/ to keep /usr/ clean and Ubuntu-specific. I strongly recommend this - it makes it easier to specify which version of a library should be used, and it prevents linker-related headaches and system reinstalls when you start getting library-related errors. I've added $HOME/env/ to the following environment variables to make it fully usable:

• PATH
• LIBDIR
• LIBRARY_PATH
• LD_LIBRARY_PATH
• C_INCLUDE_PATH
• CPLUS_INCLUDE_PATH
• PKG_CONFIG_PATH

GPlugin

​GPlugin was added as a Pidgin dependency in May 2015. It's meant to allow plugins to be written in any programming language through the use of ​GObject introspection. There were build problems in 0.18 involving Mozilla's gjs library (apparently only C++ headers were available while C headers were needed), but that's been removed as a dependency for now.

GPlugin is new, and isn't yet included in Debian or Ubuntu's package repos. You therefore have to build from source. Additionally, I wasn't able to find which (if any) environment variable determines the search path for .gir files. I therefore grudgingly installed it without my build environment prefix. I've since been told that such an environment variable does exist, though - I'll share it here once I find it.

libnice

​libnice is a library implementing ICE and STUN which is used by the voice/video stack.

It's Ubuntu package is derived from the Debian package, which is maintained by the ​Debian Telepathy Maintainers. This package is currently at version 0.1.7-1 in the repo and 0.1.4-1 in Ubuntu 15.04. The latest libnice release is 0.1.13, and we need at least 0.1.8 for the latest version of Farstream. 0.13.0 builds and tests successfully on Ubuntu 15.04, so I'm working on an update to submit.

Farstream

​Farstream is a library built atop GStreamer that offers easy, self-contained voice/video protocol implementations accessible through GObject APIs.

There are two major versions of Farstream: 0.1 and 0.2. Both are available Ubuntu 15.04's repos, but the 0.2 package's minor version is too old for Pidgin 3.0. It therefore needs to be built manually. It depends on a new version of libnice, so build that first.

GStreamer

The GStreamer library is the basis of Pidgin's voice/video support.

There are two major GStreamer versions: 0.1 and 1.0. GStreamer 0.1 has been ​officially unmaintained since March 2013 - more than two years ago. However, package and port maintainers may still patch bugs.

"Help!"

If you're having trouble building Pidgin 3.0, contact me - I'm happy to help.

Remember, config.log is your friend. Often, configure script errors (particularly involving voice/video and GTK+) are reported very generically to stdout but have specific and helpful error messages in config.log.

Also, if you come across an obstacle on your platform of choice, please report it to the relevant package maintainer with as much useful information as possible. Keeping major dependencies' packages stable and up-to-date will allow us to continue improving voice/video, desktop environment integration, etc.