20170111

Pidgin Errors with Gmail

I discovered yesterday that my Pidgin client is refusing to connect to GMail/GoogleTalk with the error:

"SSL peer presented an invalid certificate"

After half an hour of digging, I finally found this Pidgin bug with a work-around:

https://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/17118

I have no idea what's going wrong here, and I can only assume Gmail has some new cert that's not playing nice with something on my system.  But seeing as it took me so long to figure out, I thought I'd help make this easier to find for anyone else who runs into the same problem find it.

UPDATED:
After a few days, this stopped working.  I can only guess that gmail is rotate SSL certs faster than I can keep up.

But I found this Gentoo forums post:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1057862.html

Which pointed the problem at gnutls, and sure enough, emerging pidgin without the gnutls use-flag solved the problem.