Comment 9 for bug 157973

I can confirm that the bug has been fixed up stream in Pidgin release 2.5.4. But even Ubuntu 9.04 will not have this version. You'll have to upgrade manually.

I was able to successfully upgrade without loosing any functionality of plugins available from the official ubuntu release, as well as the SIPE plugin I had previously manually compiled. I was a little worried about breaking the SIPE plugin because I needed it for access to my corporate Office Communicator account, but as the Pidgin crew state, only major version upgrades should break plugins. In my experience it's safe to upgrade using the package from http://www.getdeb.net/release/3736 if you really need perl plugin support on an AMD64 machine. I'm using Hardy and upgraded with the following steps:
1. Backed up my precompiled SIPE plugin binaries (/usr/lib/pidgin/libsipe.so and /usr/lib/pidgin/libsipe.la)
2. Shutdown and uninstalled Pidgin (along with all the plugins, taking note of what plugins I was loosing)
3. Downloaded the 4 required packages for Pidgin version 2.5.4 from getdeb.net
4. Installed downloaded packages in the following order: pidgin-data; libpurple0; libpurple-bin; pidgin
5. Reinstalled previously removed plugins from official Ubuntu repository
6. Restored my SIPE binaries back into /usr/lib/pidgin/ overwriting whatever the official ubuntu pidgin-sipe plugin created in there

Pidgin started as normal with my Microsoft LCS/OCS account still intact. All other plugins worked correctly and none of my settings were lost (phew!). Most importantly Perl plugin support now works!