These are brief instructions to make Pidgin messaging application to work with Lotus Sametime (also called Meanwhile) protocol under Archlinux.
There is a nice page about Pidgin in the Archlinux documentation, this is only a summary for the particular case that I face every time I update my Archlinux system. The Sametime protocol is not included in the Pidgin package that comes in the Archlinux distribution (I guest because license issues or something like that). I create a custom package that includes Sametime, but every time I update my system the pidgin package is updated with the one included in the distribution and I lose my customized build of it so I have to recompile it again.
To compile it again but with different compiler options you have to use the AUR to download the sources and default setup and then modify options before creating the custom package.
You need to perform two steps: install the meanwhile protocol and recompile the Pidgin.
The meanwhile protocol itself can be downloaded, compiled and installed from AUR/meanwhile. I use yaourt to download, compile and install it:
yaourt -S meanwhile
To recompile the Pidgin package get its PKGFILE from ABS. First update the ABS tree. You need full internet connection beacuse rsync uses some ports that may be blocked if you are behind a corporate firewall (I use a VPN for this).
sudo abs
Then copy the PKGFILE from the ABS tree to a temporary directory and edit the PKGBUILD to remove the --disable-meanwhile (delete the line entirely).
cp -r /var/abs/extra/pidgin ~/builds
cd ~/builds/pidgin
sed '/--disable-meanwhile/d' PKGBUILD > PKGBUILD.new
mv PKGBUILD.new PKGBUILD
Then compile sources and install the generated package:
makepkg -s
sudo pacman -U *.pkg.tar.xz
Account configurations for Pidgin are stored in ~/.purple/accounts.xml.