Software Update: Pidgin 2.5.6

A new version of the program has appeared on Pidgin’s SourceForge page. This time it concerns version 2.5.6, which is available from this page is available for download for Windows and Linux. Pidgin is a multi-protocol instant messaging client for Windows and Linux that allows you to log into various chat networks, including those of MSN, AIM, Jabber, ICQ and IRC. In version 2.5.6, improvements have been made to libpurple and the support of various protocols, including IRC and MSN, has been slightly improved. In addition, a number of security vulnerabilities have been patched, which are not further specified in the release notes. The Pidgin 2.5.6 changelog looks like this:

libpurple:

• Improve sleep behavior by aggregation of longer timeouts on second boundaries to allow better power saving. (Arunan Balasubramaniam)
• Fix various crashes on exit.
• Make XML parsing more resilient to interactions with other libraries. This, along with the fix for libxml2 bug 564217, fixes the crashes on connect in XMPP with recent gst-plugins-bad (see #8830 for details).
• Many security related fixes

IRC:

• Correctly handle WHOIS for users who are joined to a large number of channels.
• Notify the user if a /nick command fails, rather than trying fallback nicks.

MSN:

• Fix a race condition causing occasional Pidgin crashes.
• Fix some errors about the friendly name changing too fast caused by MSN/Yahoo integration buddies.

XMPP:

• Less likely to pop up a new conversation window in disregard of the “Hide new IM conversations” preference.

yahoo:

• Fix a crash when sending very long messages.
• Fix a bug where UTF-8 status messages get garbled when going idle.