Chasing the Pidgin

Recently it came into my attention that the GAIM team has chose to rename the project to Pidgin and checking the new site I saw that Pidgin 2.0.0 release is available for download.

Unfortunately among the offered binary builds there was no Debian package for Ubuntu Feisty (that's what I'm running at work) and neither does the Ubuntu repositories offer a package.

So after some googling I found a few .deb packages (from which I chose one from download.ubuntu.pl). Installing the package, however, was a bit of pain due to the fact that I already had gaim 2.0.0 (beta7) installed and that was generating dependency issues: since nautilus-sendto is (wronly) dependent on gaim, uninstalling it would trigger uninstalling the whole ubuntu-desktop package.

Here is what I needed to do in order to remain with a clean package tree:

1. Forcibly uninstall gaim ignoring the nautilus-sendto dependency:
   

   sudo dpkg --purge --ignore-depends=nautilus-sendto gaim

   
   
2. Uninstalled the gaim-data package:
   

   sudo dpkg --purge gaim-data

   
   
3. Edited by hand the /var/lib/dpkg/status to remove the stale gaim dependency in the nautilus-sendto package
   
4. Installed pidgin package:
   

   sudo dpkg -i pidgin_2.0.0-1_i386.deb

   
   
5. Fix the packaging list (and eventually installing unresolved pidgin dependencies):
   

   sudo apt-get -f install

   
   

I must admit that the fact that the package database being a flat text-file saved the day — otherwise it would have been a tough day for me searching for a fix. Kudos to the dpkg guys for doing this the right(TM) way. ;)