Package: pidgin Version: 2.11.0-3 Severity: normal Dear Maintainer,
As has been reported on various tech-news sites, AOL is dropping support for older versions of the authentication methods which third-party clients such as Pidgin use to connect to the AOL Instant Messenger service. This dropping of support is scheduled to take effect on March 28th, well before the expected release of Debian stretch. The official word from upstream is that version 2.12 of Pidgin will include support for the newer authentication methods involved, and that this version is due for release in about a week. To release Debian stretch with a version of Pidgin which no longer supports connecting to one of the major instant-messaging networks, despite a version which does still support that being available, would obviously be undesirable. However, as we are already within the release freeze, including the fix is not as straightforward as simply packaging the new upstream version directly after its release. Please take whatever measures are appropriate to ensure that a version of pidgin which supports the new required authentication mode for AIM either ships with Debian stretch, or is available to users of stretch as promptly as possible after the release occurs. If such a version can be available (even if from another repository) to users of testing in the meantime, that would be even better. -- System Information: Debian Release: 9.0 APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/12 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init) Versions of packages pidgin depends on: ii libatk1.0-0 2.22.0-1 ii libc6 2.24-9 ii libcairo2 1.14.8-1 ii libdbus-1-3 1.10.16-1 ii libdbus-glib-1-2 0.108-2 ii libfontconfig1 2.11.0-6.7+b1 ii libfreetype6 2.6.3-3+b2 ii libgadu3 1:1.12.1-4 ii libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 2.36.5-2 ii libglib2.0-0 2.50.3-1 ii libgstreamer1.0-0 1.10.3-1 ii libgtk2.0-0 2.24.31-2 ii libgtkspell0 2.0.16-1.1 ii libice6 2:1.0.9-1+b1 ii libpango-1.0-0 1.40.3-3 ii libpangocairo-1.0-0 1.40.3-3 ii libpangoft2-1.0-0 1.40.3-3 ii libpurple0 2.11.0-3 ii libsm6 2:1.2.2-1+b1 ii libx11-6 2:1.6.4-3 ii libxss1 1:1.2.2-1 ii perl-base [perlapi-5.24.1] 5.24.1-1 ii pidgin-data 2.11.0-3 Versions of packages pidgin recommends: ii gstreamer1.0-alsa 1.10.3-1 ii gstreamer1.0-libav 1.10.3-1 ii gstreamer1.0-plugins-base 1.10.3-1 ii gstreamer1.0-plugins-good 1.10.3-1 Versions of packages pidgin suggests: ii libsqlite3-0 3.16.2-2 -- debconf-show failed
