Pidgin is a huge project with a ton of things to be done, even if you’re not a coder. Below is a short list of things you can do to help get involved!!
For the coders out there:
Submitting good bug reports is very important.
Remember that we don’t support third-party plugins like the ones we showcase in the plugins section of this site. We didn’t develop those plugins and can’t help you with those issues. Keep in mind that a sizable majority of crashes are caused by misbehaving plugins so the first thing to check when an issue appears is whether the issue is caused by a plugin or not.
Make sure your plugins are in the most current version available.
Disable plugins you have loaded (one by one) until you eliminate the source of the crash.
If your crash happens on startup of the application, you can try renaming the
prefs.xml file in the .purple directory to something such as
prefs.xml.old to force a startup without plugins. Note that this means that
you will lose all settings stored there.
By now you should know whether the crash is caused by a plugin (ie only happens when a specific plugin is enabled) or if it’s an issue in Pidgin itself.
Ensure that you have read the Before you submit any bug report section. This will save you and the Pidgin developers time.
Search our issue tracking platform for existing bug reports that match the issue you have encountered. This is to ensure that we are not submitting a duplicate issue.
If the bug you are reporting is a previously unknown security vulnerability, please read our Security page for details on how to submit a security vulnerability report. It’s of utmost importance that security issues are not made public until we have the chance to fix them, otherwise our users will be vulnerable until we are able to fix the issue and release a new version of Pidgin.
If you checked all the steps we mentioned before, then go ahead and create the issue in our issue tracking platform.
You need to be logged in to our issue tracker in order to submit issues.
If you don’t already have an account, click on the Login button and from there you’ll have the option to either use use one of the social logins available or create a new account directly in our Jetbrains Hub instance, which is the platform we use to handle authentication.
Ensure you are logged in with your account in our issue tracking platform.
Submit the bug report, take your time to describe the issue with as much depth as possible and if you can it would also be important to provide the steps needed to reproduce the issue. Another useful section that you may want to checkout, particularly if the issue is about a crash in the application itself, is the Debugging Pidgin one since over there it’s explained how to obtain a debug log or a crash dump which will help Pidgin developers a lot when looking at how to fix an issue.
We acknowledge that Pidgin leverages tools that a lot of developers may not be familiar with so we created documentation that helps you getting started and at the same time explains how our contribution process works.
Instant Messaging Freedom Contributors Guide
If you have any questions about this process, remember that you have a variety of methods to reach out to us.