Arch Linux User Repository

Garuda Arch Linux, fish terminal, hardware more than adequate. Goal: install and use pidgin with several plugins, including purple-discord. Plugins are not usable in flathub pidgin.

This is driving me batty over more than a week now while I look for new chat clients/services. The search was prompted by discord insisting on age verification. One of the biggest challenges is trying to convince less technical friends to jump through hoops for security and privacy. Pidgin could help me stay in touch with people as everyone scatters to the winds.

Method (all of the following packages mentioned sourced from AUR.) I tried manually installing missing dependencies. gtkspell needed gtk2 and I saw there was a patch, gtk2-patched-filechooser-icon-view, so I grabbed that and installed it. Then followed the dependency chain back up and installed all of those piecemeal, only for gtkspell to error out claiming gtk2 wasn't installed. Backing up a few steps, I found the non-patched gtk2 and installed that. Same error from gtkspell. At this point, it was brute forcing it time, so I opened up the PKGBUILD in ~/pidgin-gtkui and removed all references to gtkspell. it ran for a bit and then had an error to do with the PGP keys. So I looked up how to bypass that, only since I knowingly edited the PKGBUILD myself (make-pkg --skipinteg) that ran for quite a while and I was feeling hopeful.

It ran some more and it looked successful until the below error. Given that both gtk2 and gtk2-patched-filechooser-icon-view were installed, I ran out of ideas.

 checking for gtk+-2.0 >= 2.10.0... no
 no
 configure: error:

 You must have GTK+ 2.10.0 or newer development headers installed to compile
 Pidgin.  If you want to build only Finch then specify --disable-gtkui when
 running configure.

 ==> ERROR: A failure occurred in build().
 Aborting...

Still problems: In addition to the fix below, pidgin runs fine when called from the build directory ($pkgname-$pkgver/pidgin/pidgin) but continues to crash when called the usual way (/usr/bin/pidgin).

Does anybody have any idea what happens during install that might explain this? Thank you so much.

After 12+ hours of pidgin not crashing I am cautiously optimistic that the patch suggested in https://issues.imfreedom.org/issue/PIDGIN-18155/Pidgin-is-crashing-with-GStreamer-gstdevicegetdeviceclass-assertion-GSTISDEVICE-device-failed fixes the current pidgin issue that may be related to the gstreamer version. I applied the following patch:

--- a/libpurple/mediamanager.c  2026-03-08 12:56:44.152184749 -0400
+++ b/libpurple/mediamanager.c  2026-03-08 13:01:37.960970549 -0400
@@ -2216,7 +2216,7 @@
            "create-cb", gst_device_create_cb,
            NULL);

-   g_object_set_data(G_OBJECT(info), "gst-device", device);
+   g_object_set_data_full(G_OBJECT(info), "gst-device", g_object_ref(device), g_object_unref);

    purple_media_manager_register_element(manager, info);

by patching the PKGBUILD as follows:

--- PKGBUILD.original   2026-03-10 09:04:01.877908647 -0400
+++ PKGBUILD    2026-03-10 09:03:10.684497453 -0400
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
 pkgbase=pidgin-gtkui
 pkgname=('pidgin')
 pkgver=2.14.14
-pkgrel=4
+pkgrel=5
 arch=('x86_64')
 url="https://pidgin.im/"
 license=('GPL')
@@ -24,6 +24,8 @@
 build() {
   cd $pkgname-$pkgver

+  patch -p1 < ../../gstreamer.patch
+
   ./configure \
     --prefix=/usr \
     --sysconfdir=/etc \

I apologize to those who saw my previous message, which was misleading. I am able to crash Pidgin systematically on all my Arch boxes. The crashes appear to be caused by calls to Gstreamer (currently at version 1.28.1-1). Here is what I get when running it under Valgrind:

==823966== Process terminating with default action of signal 6 (SIGABRT): dumping core
==823966==    at 0x5B4AA2C: __pthread_kill_implementation (pthread_kill.c:44)
==823966==    by 0x5AF019F: raise (raise.c:26)
==823966==    by 0x5AD75FD: abort (abort.c:77)
==823966==    by 0x4080C5A: ??? (in /usr/bin/pidgin)
==823966==    by 0x5AF02CF: ??? (in /usr/lib/libc.so.6)
==823966==    by 0x4B33C15: gst_device_get_display_name (gstdevice.c:263)
==823966==    by 0x58C8D3D: UnknownInlinedFun (mediamanager.c:2254)
==823966==    by 0x58C8D3D: UnknownInlinedFun (mediamanager.c:2299)
==823966==    by 0x58C8D3D: device_monitor_bus_cb (mediamanager.c:2286)
==823966==    by 0x4B27583: gst_bus_source_dispatch (gstbus.c:841)
==823966==    by 0x561EF4C: g_main_dispatch (gmain.c:3565)
==823966==    by 0x5620616: UnknownInlinedFun (gmain.c:4425)
==823966==    by 0x5620616: g_main_context_iterate_unlocked.isra.0 (gmain.c:4490)
==823966==    by 0x56209D6: g_main_loop_run (gmain.c:4695)
==823966==    by 0x4DA6894: gtk_main (in /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.2400.33)

I tried building with --disable-gstreamer --disable-gstreamer-video --disable-vv but that did not improve anything. I am now trying a variant of the patch proposed in https://issues.imfreedom.org/issue/PIDGIN-18155/Pidgin-is-crashing-with-GStreamer-gstdevicegetdeviceclass-assertion-GSTISDEVICE-device-failed so far so good and I will report after a few more tests.

The package compiled after removing the line 'find "$pkgdir/usr/lib/perl5" -name perllocal.pod -delete' from PKGBUILD (almost at the very end)

Hi, this is the Pidgin upstream. We've been getting multiple reports about this Pidgin package crashing, but the stack traces users have gotten haven't been useful.

One user has switched to the flatpak and no longer has issues which leads me to believe that there's something wrong with this package as I'm not able to reproduce on other operating systems and don't have an a machine running arch anywhere.

I was hoping someone here could take a look. The upstream issue can be found here[1].

[1] https://issues.imfreedom.org/issue/PIDGIN-18152

The build fails for me because the last find command fails to find a perl5 in $pkgdir:

find: ‘/home/photon/.cache/yay/pidgin-gtkui/pkg/pidgin/usr/lib/perl5’: No such file or directory

Indeed there is no such file or directory:

$ ls -l /home/photon/.cache/yay/pidgin-gtkui/pkg/pidgin/usr/lib/
insgesamt 8
drwxr-xr-x 3 photon photon 4096 10. Dez 19:54 pidgin
drwxr-xr-x 2 photon photon 4096 10. Dez 19:54 pkgconfig

Is there a way to avoid gtkspell as it wants the obsolete gtk2

This has been going on for three days now

yay -Syu --noconfirm --sudoloop  pidgin-gtkui
...
==> Making package: pidgin-gtkui 2.14.14-4 (Mon Nov 24 09:34:28 2025)
==> Retrieving sources...
  -> Found pidgin-2.14.14.tar.bz2
  -> Found pidgin-2.14.14.tar.bz2.asc
==> WARNING: Skipping verification of source file PGP signatures.
==> Validating source files with sha256sums...
    pidgin-2.14.14.tar.bz2 ... Passed
    pidgin-2.14.14.tar.bz2.asc ... Skipped
:: (1/1) Parsing SRCINFO: pidgin-gtkui
gpg: error reading key: No public key

 :: PGP keys need importing:
 -> 40DE1DC7288FE3F50AB938C548F66AFFD9BDB729, required by: pidgin-gtkui
:: Importing keys with gpg...
gpg: keyserver receive failed: Connection timed out
 -> problem importing keys