There are several bug reports around about Empathy not saving the aliases for Yahoo, but what I'm seeing is that it actually has saved them (somewhere) because when I open the chat windows it shows the edited aliases, but it is just in the buddies list* that it only shows the Yahoo id.
So I don't know how related, different, or identical this is to previous reports, but it doesn't seem to be exactly the same because of what is mentioned in those reports - about there not being an API to save the info, since it appears it is saved (somewhere). Maybe if I logged into Yahoo somewhere else it wouldn't be saved?
So this bug report is basically that - if it can show them in the chat window, perhaps it can/should be showing them in the list - even if it didn't saved back to Yahoo, that perhaps is not possible.
* I don't know this is called in Empathy because my computer is in Japanese, but hopefully you know what I mean.
Oops, forgot to say, Ubuntu Maverick, everything up-to-date, Empathy 2.32.0.1.