State of the Bird December 2025
The State of the Bird is a recap of what has been happening in the project and related projects.
You can find the previous posts via the state-of-the-bird tag.
Retrospective
Our last State of the Bird was December 30th 2025 and can be found here.
Numbers in general were quite low this month. My (Gary) burn out has still been pretty bad. I’m still pushing but much slower that usual which is apparently in the metrics and everything else.
We were hoping for the Experimental 5 (2.94.0) release to actually be Alpha 1 but it just didn’t happen. The big blocker right now for Alpha 1 or what we’ll consider stable enough for people to start working against it is that we’re overhauling the account setting API and there’s a lot of work to do there yet.
It is my hope that this will be done by the Experimental 6 date (2026-03-31) and that will become Alpha 1, but I’ve got to shake this burn out.
I’ve all but completely stopped streaming Pidgin development on [Twitch](Twitch] and YouTube which has helped a lot, but it hasn’t been enough. But I’m going to keep pushing without streaming regardless.
That said we can always use help, especially with code reviews which is a great way to start learning how things work and come together!
Metrics
We have a number of metrics we keep an eye on which you can see below.
Contributors
The number of contributors continues to fluctuate a bit, but that’s expected for a volunteer project.
If you’re interested in contributing you can find some documentation here including ways that don’t require knowing how to program.
Review Requests
Review requests are what we call our code reviews and is the way that all code is accepted into our code bases. This is a look at how many were open and closed each month.
Issues
This is a look at the number of issues that were opened in our issue tracker as well as how many were closed by month. We don’t create issues for everything we do, this is still good to look at as it will include bugs and other issues users have brought to our attention.
Commits
This is a break down of commits to each project per month. In most cases a review request is just a single commit, but this chart helps to see what projects are being worked on.
Infrastructure
Registrations were re-enabled as I haven’t been streaming as much and that was the target of the spammers. They were spamming issues to get their comments displayed on stream.
We started looking at deploying Garage and using it to serve the static sites but haven’t completed that yet.
pidgin3
Pidgin 3 is our next generation universal chat client whose goal is to give you the best experience possible when using modern chat networks.
Retrospective
A bit of development and a lot of maintenance this month, but nothing real flashy or anything. But we did our snapshot release of Experimental 5.
Highlights
- Update subtitles for conversations properly (RR 4262)
- Add an out of office presence primitive (RR 4284)
- Create Purple.PresenceManagerBackend (RR 4279)
- Create Purple.PresenceManagerSeagullBackend (RR 4286)
- Add status-message and can-send-message properties to Purple.Conversation (PIDGIN-18124) (RR 4285)
Releases
- Experimental 5 (2.94.0) was released on 2025-12-31 (Release Announcement)
Future Plans
- Finish persistence contacts, conversations, scheduled tasks, presences, etc.
The following items are still in the works from the last state of the bird.
- The account options API is in the process of being replaced by a new
AccountSettingAPI. - Add persistence to the scheduler.
- Add persistence to the contact manager, this needs to be done so we can fix some issues with direct messages being restored correctly.
As always, you can view the burn down chart for our next release here.
pidgin2
Pidgin 2 is our stable “production” release of a universal chat client. Meaning that you can use it as a single interface to many chat networks!
Retrospective
We’re still planning on doing a 2.15.0 release, but we haven’t moved forward on this at all this month.
Highlights
No Updates
Releases
None
Future Plans
We still need to finish up the build environment packages so we can upgrade GTK on windows and get that all into the installer. We also need to remember to update the spell checking dictionaries as we haven’t done that in awhile.
Gaim 3
As announced in the last State of the Bird, we’ve started an additional user interface to keep the look and feel of Pidgin 2 and Gaim before it in GTK4 and we’ve chosen to name it Gaim.
Retrospective
A little but of work this month. The goal is to announce and have something usable by April 1st, but that’s seeming less and less likely, but we’ll see.
Highlights
- Update to the current purple3
Releases
None
Future Plans
Once the account settings API is finished up we’re going to start moving pretty quickly here.
GPlugin
GPlugin is our GObject based plugin library that is used in Pidgin 3.
Retrospective
Some minor maintenance stuff.
Highlights
- Add support for python 3.14 and drop python 3.9 (RR 4304)
Releases
None
Future Plans
We’re going to continue moving forward with the GLib.List → Gio.ListModel changes and eventually have GPlugin.Manager implement Gio.ListModel.
hasl
HASL is the Hassle-free Authentication and Security Layer library. It implements SASL in a modern and easy use way compared to the existing libraries.
Retrospective
No activity this month.
Highlights
None
Releases
None
Future Plans
We have been in the progress of implementing the SCRAM Mechanisms which will be included in the next release.
Birb
Birb is a library of GLib utilities that we use across all of our projects.
Retrospective
A bit of work happened here this month including two releases. It probably should have only been one release, but hot fixes are necessary sometimes.
Highlights
- Fix some issues with the check-license-header script (RR 4276)
- Add a doap file (RR 4282)
- Run the response_stream test by itself (RR 4277)
- Bring in the Purple.Menu API (RR 4283)
- Add an override for the check-license-headers script (RR 4292)
Releases
- 0.6.0 was released on 2025-12-28 (Release Announcement)
- 0.6.1 was released on 2025-12-29 (Release Announcement)
Future Plans
We need to create some basic HTML and Markdown formatters.
Xeme
Xeme is our XMPP integration library. It is the basis for both the Link Local Messaging (Bonjour) and XMPP protocols in Pidgin 3. It is still early in development and has not yet had a release.
Retrospective
No work this month.
Highlights
None
Releases
None
Future Plans
The next steps here are going to be creating unit tests with Birb.ResponseStream to do initial connection and feature negotiation.
Ibis
Ibis is our IRCv3 integration library. It has seen a lot of active development as it is used in the IRCv3 protocol plugin in Pidgin 3.
We are nearing known feature completion on it and expect to do a 1.0 release in the near future.
Retrospective
Nothing new, but we did cut a release for the stuff that was pending.
Highlights
Just the release
Releases
- 0.15.0 was released on 2025-12-30 (Release Announcement)
Future Plans
Continue working through the open issues and watching new IRCv3 specifications for things we should be including.
Once Birb 0.6.0 is released we will be adding outgoing formatting support.
Hiya
Hiya is a new client abstraction library for mDNS. It was created to help make implementation of the Link Local Messaging protocol easier as we would have to abstract out the different platform implementations and by putting it in a library that abstraction can be used by other projects.
Hiya has not yet had a release.
Myna
Myna is a new integration library for Matrix. It is still extremely early in development.
Seagull
Seagull is a new library we created to make working with SQLite feel more like a GLIB/GNOME library and force usage of prepared statements with named parameters and other similar things.
Retrospective
No changes this month.
Highlights
None
Releases
None
Future Plans
We have a few features to fill out yet and a few ideas that need a bit more time in the oven.
More specific details can be found in our open issues.
Traversity
Traversity is a new library for traversing NATs. There are many different ways to traverse a NAT and the goal of Traversity is to hide that from developers who just need to traverse a NAT.
It is still early in development and has not yet had an official release.
retro-prpl
retro-prpl is a new repository we’ve created on GitHub. This repository contains all of the abandoned protocols that have ever lived in our code base and is meant to make them easier to study and for people to use with services like Retro AIM Server, escargot, and NINA.
Retrospective
Just some minor stuff, we need to get this wrapped up and full released.
Highlights
- Default the AIM settings to use MD5 Auth and not use TLS (#74)
Releases
None
Future Plans
We have a bunch of open issues that we could use some help testing with. If you’re interested in helping please don’t hesitate to jump in!
Closing
We have a lot to do going forward but we’re still striving hoping that the Experimental 6 release which is due 2026-03-31 will actually be Alpha 1. The distinction is whether not not we think the protocol specific APIs are stable enough for third party protocol developers.
We don’t have this well defined yet, and it’s more of a feel than anything, but we’ve had a few people tinkering with third party protocols with moderate success which is absolutely amazing!! So as they continue working on their protocols we’re getting good feedback on basically everything which is extremely helpful!
I have also been working on an out of tree protocol plugin for Twitch.tv named spasm which is coming together pretty well.
We hope you all are enjoying the new format and if you have any questions of comments please leave them below!