What happens with pidgin when networkmanager isn't running and/or dbus isn't available? Will it run, or will it, as it did before, crash? The point here is that networkmanager should be optional for a program like pidgin, which isn't the case when it crashes in environments without networkmanager.

I tried uninstalling the networkmanager package (0.7 from testing) and then killing the networkmanager daemon. Pidgin started up fine and worked exactly the same as it did with the stock Arch package (IM connection dies when wifi dies, but doesn't come back after wifi reconnect).

So, not having networkmanager does not cause problems even with networkmanager support compiled for pidgin (which is why I filed this request).

I haven't tried killing off dbus, but doesn't X now need hal, and doesn't hal autostart dbus? the pidgin package depends on packages that depend on hal dbus, so both of those will already be installed (and likely running).

Hello? How it is with this task? I had to recompile pidgin again today... ;(
It seems pidgin with nm support works also without nm. so whats the catch?

++resovling this issue

If X starts pidgin before a wifi connection is established, pidgin is no longer able to resolve DNS names and has to be restarted (apparently its the way DNS works in glibc).
...Which defeats the purpose of autostarting pidgin.

Support for NetworkManager sidesteps this issue. 1/2 bugfix + 1/2 feature request

yes. thats second issue. i had the same problem before i started to use network manager enabled pidgin.
but it was affecting more applications and when pidgin was connecting it caused problems with resolving DNS not only to itself, but also to other applications like firefox, totem and few others. (for example: "curl google.com" and "ping google.com" worked allright...)

then i was forced to restart these applications...

FYI i tried again nm enabled pidgin without nm and dbus and it worked same way like nm disabled pidgin do - so if somebody doesn't have it, everything will be OK.

Please make this happen :P

some progress?

I hope to see this in the 2.6.6 PKGBUILD...

Oops, I mean 2.5.6.

There is cool new feature in latest pidgin which makes nm-support possible without affecting users whose don't like it:

"Added -f command line option to tell Pidgin to ignore NetworkManager and assume it has a valid network connection." ( http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/ChangeLog )

So now you can add nm support to archlinux package now and add "-f" to /usr/share/applications/pidgin.desktop or you can rename pidgin binary to /usr/bin/pidgin-nm and make wrapper script /usr/bin/pidgin which will launch it with "-f" option.

Reference to my earlier comment, about needing network-manager to resolve DNS names: just found out about nscd (part of glibc) which detects changes in NSS resources including /etc/resolv.conf and automatically flushes the cache. Works only for glibc name reseolver. Cool point is, network-manager in pidgin is no longer necessary to fix the DNS issue.

yea, nscd fixed my issues with several applications (including pidgin) few months ago. but it doesn't really matter now, because pidgin package is not supposed to force nscd to be running. Anyway there's no longer reason to not add nm support to pidgin (it's not dependent on any version of nm and it can be disabled somehow using "-f" argument). Using pidgin without nm on wifi connection really sux.

BTW makepkg now enables building of multiple packages with one PKGBUILD, so there can be also package which will add nm-support and package with Purple for perl (pidgin-perl).