Pidgin : Log in invisible for Google Talk (XMPP/Jabber)

I am a big fan of pidgin, primarily due to it's configurability and plugin support. One of major turn-off people report around me is that pidgin does not support logging in as invisible with gtalk account. Not that I am a big fan of invisibility, I built a plugin that lets you do just that.

Not supporting neat 'sign on as invisible' for gtalk is basically due to lack of time and willingness on Pidgin developers' part. Not that they can't, they just don't want to at the moment due to some extra stuff gtalk uses/needs.

Installation instructions:

It is written in Perl, which means you need perl 5+, pidgin-perl and libpurple-perl packages.


On apt based systems (like Ubuntu), do (as root)
apt-get install pidgin-perl

looks like Ubuntu 9.10 has this built in.

on fedora and alike

yum install pidgin-perl

That should install all required packages, with dependencies.

Download and extract the plugin perl script.
Save it to your ~/.purple/plugins/ directory. That is, /home/{username}/.purple/plugins/.
If you find that hard, there is an install script included.

Usage:
Go to Tools->Plugins. Find 'Google Talk Invisible Plugin' and enable it.
Now, when you set your status as "Extended Away", you become invisible. Simple!

This is the pre-pre-pre-...-alpha release, which means I did not go through the trouble of activating the INVISIBLE status for gtalk accounts, and hijacked xa instead. I hope it is not a big mistake.

Update : there is a serious bug in this plugin. After you become invisible, you can not get updates to your contact list, and hence if you start pidgin with the plugin enabled in extended away mode, you may not see any online friends at all. I am working on it.