Fix broken user status in Pidgin/Meanwhile

The user status display of the meanwhile plugin in Pidgin on Ubuntu is broken. If a user has logged in to the Sametime server before I start Pidgin, the user will still show offline in Pidgin. This has the effect that you get messages from offline users .

This bug was reported in Pidgin as ticket #58. It got fixed in Meanwhile and is fixed in the Windows version for quite some time now. On Ubuntu however it still exists. The reason is that on Linux the Meanwhile library is a separate package that gets installed and maintained independently of Pidgin. And Meanwhile hasn’t released a new official version since the bug was fixed, so Ubuntu still includes version 1.0.2 of Meanwhile.

But the comments on ticket #58 have a description how one can build a fixed version of libmeanwhile:

• get the source code

$ apt-get source meanwhile

• get the following files from Meanwhile CVS 1.1.0 branch: cipher.c, mw_cipher.h, mw_st_list.h, common.c, mw_common.h, srvc_conf.c (don’t make the same mistake I made. You want the files labeled for 1.1.0 branch, not the head revision)
• edit debian/changelog
• build the patched package

$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -uc -b

• install the patched package

$ sudo dpkg -i libmeanwhile1_1.0.2-3-1_amd64.deb

You can find my patched package for 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04 here, the patched developer package and the patched source code.