Bug 553272

Summary: pidgin does not remember passwords
Product: [openSUSE] openSUSE 11.2 Reporter: Holger Sickenberg <holgi>
Component: GNOMEAssignee: E-mail List <gnome-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity: Major    
Priority: P3 - Medium CC: cobexer, jengelh, lnussel, novellbmw, sbrabec, vuntz, wolfgang
Version: Final   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: x86-64   
OS: Other   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Component Test Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Holger Sickenberg 2009-11-06 13:19:44 UTC
I'm using pidgin in an openbox environment. Everytime when I do start pidgin I have to enter the passwords for all of my 4 accounts even I selected
[X] Remember Password
Maybe a gnome application for storing passwords is missing. But if so the dependencies of pidgin do miss them.

Just for completeness: With 11.1 I was using pidgin in the same environment without any problem with storing the passwords.
Comment 1 Ming Xi Wu 2009-11-09 13:57:08 UTC
Can't reproduce the bug with pidgin-2.6.2, openSUSE 11.2 RC2
Comment 2 Holger Sickenberg 2009-11-10 09:32:20 UTC
In the same environment?
Comment 3 Bernhard Wiedemann 2009-12-30 16:13:23 UTC
I can reproduce this on 11.2-GM-i586 with icewm and pidgin-2.6.2-3.4.3.
On first start, passwords are loaded+used and removed from my old ~/.purple/accounts.xml
and even when "Remember Password" is checked, they are never written there again.

Bug also occurs with pidgin-2.6.4-4.1 from GNOME:Apps repo.

My workaround so far is to copy over the old accounts.xml that includes the <password>xxx</password> lines before starting pidgin, but this is not good for everyone and hard to maintain.
Comment 4 Bernhard Wiedemann 2009-12-30 16:15:32 UTC
*** Bug 555610 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 5 Christoph Obexer 2010-01-04 21:23:08 UTC
same problem here on Factory with pidgin 2.6.4-2.6-x86_64 (openSUSE OSS i think) and 2.6.4-4.1-x86_64 from openSUSE BuildService GNOME:Applications

gets kind of annoying to reenter the passwords on every pidgin start^^
Comment 6 Vincent Untz 2010-01-05 13:34:48 UTC
Can you try the pidgin package from home:vuntz:11.2-testing? It should not use the keyring if it's not running.

(this is only for 11.2 for now, though)
Comment 7 Christoph Obexer 2010-01-05 14:07:08 UTC
sorry i can't install that since this requires perl 5.10.0 ant that is not available for Factory (and using it would destroy yast)

however not using the keyring would store the password in plaintext again i think - so i only consider that as a temporary workaround
Comment 8 Jan Engelhardt 2010-01-05 14:08:12 UTC
(In reply to comment #6)
> Can you try the pidgin package from home:vuntz:11.2-testing? It should not use
> the keyring if it's not running.
> 
> (this is only for 11.2 for now, though)

Works, thanks!
Comment 9 Vincent Untz 2010-01-05 14:56:23 UTC
(In reply to comment #7)
> however not using the keyring would store the password in plaintext again i
> think - so i only consider that as a temporary workaround

If you're running factory, you're most likely hit by bug 567938, which is slightly different.
Comment 10 Jan Engelhardt 2010-01-05 16:43:55 UTC
>however not using the keyring would store the password in plaintext

dm-crypt on /home works wonders. On the desktop, at least.. ;)
Comment 11 Bernhard Wiedemann 2010-01-06 08:10:47 UTC
Vincent: your packages fixed this bug. 
I installed http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/vuntz:/11.2-testing/openSUSE_11.2/i586/libpurple-2.6.3-0.3.1.i586.rpm http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/vuntz:/11.2-testing/openSUSE_11.2/i586/pidgin-2.6.3-0.3.1.i586.rpm
and now passwords remain saved in accounts.xml.

Here is some reasoning why this is actually not all that bad (even though encrypted keyrings are certainly better):
http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords
Comment 12 Stanislav Brabec 2010-01-14 17:27:56 UTC
Vincent, do you think that your patch is ready to be used in online update instead of approach described in bug 566286 comment 17?
Comment 13 Vincent Untz 2010-01-14 17:47:33 UTC
(In reply to comment #12)
> Vincent, do you think that your patch is ready to be used in online update
> instead of approach described in bug 566286 comment 17?

No, this patch is not perfect either. The fact that a password saved in the xml is removed once you use pidgin and a keyring is running is problematic.

If we were assuming that pidgin would only run in GNOME, then the current patch would be fine. But if we cannot assume this, then I think we'll hit issues whatever we try to do if we try to use the keyring. I prefer to remove the patch if possible...
Comment 14 Vincent Untz 2010-01-18 14:15:21 UTC
Stanislav disabled the keyring usage in pidgin for openSUSE, so closing.