inside Alan's cluttered head
Pidgin and Yahoo
I ran into a strange bug with pidgin where I could not log into Yahoo. Strace did not shed any light on the problem:
gettimeofday({1245688276, 23774}, NULL) = 0
open("/home/alan/.gnome2/nautilus-sendto/spool", O_RDONLY...
fstat64(7, {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...
getdents(7, /* 3 entries */, 4096) = 48
getdents(7, /* 0 entries */, 4096) = 0
close(7) = 0
read(3, 0x93c4508, 4096) = -1 EAGAIN ...
gettimeofday({1245688276, 24697}, NULL) = 0
poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN},...
Instead, the answer came from a blog post here.
Yahoo changed their login protocol. Pidgin released an update. Ubuntu did not propagate the fix, apparently because it was not a security bug, but new functionality.
The pidgin developers have released an Ubuntu package in their PPA (Personal Package Archive). See the details at the pidgin web site here.
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I wonder just exactly how Ubuntu defines “new functionality” when it’s clearly simply fixing functionality that became broken. Something seems a bit wrong there.
Thanks to a security vulnerability (CVE-2009-1889), an updated version of Pidgin has been pushed out to Jaunty users.
This should serve as a lesson to developers… always keep a couple of security flaws in your code, just in case you need to force a distro to release an update.