Remember Pidgin? The long-running messaging client is still under active development, and more than a year after its first experimental Pidgin 3.0 release, it has now reached alpha.
According to the developers, this is a major milestone because the protocol APIs are now stable enough for third-party protocol developers to begin working on their integrations without expecting major rewrites. At the same time, the project makes clear that this is still not a release for end users.
The team says many features remain unimplemented, the interface is far from polished, and there are still many bugs, to the point that packagers are being asked not to ship it for users yet.
On the technical side, one of the main changes in this alpha is the move from the old AccountOption API to a new AccountSettings API. The developers say this is fully bindable and better suited for protocol plugins written in languages such as Python or Lua.
Additionally, the change removes the long-standing requirement for each account to revolve around a generic “username” field, allowing protocols such as IRC to use more appropriate terminology like “nick.”
The account editor has been reworked to match the new settings model. Pidgin now places account settings into a single list, with advanced options shown inline, and protocols can control display order through a weight property while also validating account settings before a connection attempt is made.
Another notable addition is Zulip, introduced as a new in-tree protocol plugin. The team says it chose Zulip because it is open-source, supports third-party clients, and offers a straightforward REST API with HTTP long polling for events.
However, direct messages did not make it in time for this alpha, but according to devs, that work is close and should land early in the next cycle.
Finally, the release adds a developer mode that exposes unfinished protocols and other work-in-progress elements that are hidden by default. In parallel, the project has now removed its libxml2 dependency after continuing its migration away from old XML configuration files toward SQLite-backed implementations.
For more details, see the announcement.
