After upgrade to 20.04, notifications not working as expected

[Christopher Townsend]

I'm observing the following behavior after upgrading to 20.04.

1. I don't get any notifications in the Gnome notification area if my name is highlighted in chat.
2. I also don't get notifications in private messages when someone says something to me.
3. I also get a weird "#some_channel is ready" (where #some_channel is the name of a particular chat tab) notification after some time. If I then focus the Pidgin window, nothing new is in the particular tab that prompted the notification.

Note that all of these behaviors were not observed in 18.04, my previous version of Ubuntu.

Let me know if there is any other info I can provide.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: pidgin 1:2.13.0-2.2ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.4.0-12.15-generic 5.4.8
Uname: Linux 5.4.0-12-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu15
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Mon Jan 27 12:09:10 2020
InstallationDate: Installed on 2019-09-06 (143 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Release amd64 (20190805)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: pidgin
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to focal on 2020-01-22 (5 days ago)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report. Do you get notifications from other applications? Does notify-send work to display one?
Could you add 'journalctl -b 0' log to the bug?

[Christopher Townsend (townsend)]

Hey seb128,

It appears to me all other applications that send notifications are working properly. Only Pidgin seems to be problematic.

Yes, notify-send works as expected too.

Thanks!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Sylvain Pineau (sylvain-pineau)]

Same here, managed to run pidgin for years across releases but notifications have always been an issue since gnome-shell.

For 20.04 https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2311/topicons-plus/ seems to work (even if it's not a native solution of course).

[voidstarstar (voidstarstar)]

This seems like it's caused by the removal of pidgin-libnotify from the 20.04 repository. Was this done by mistake? The pidgin package recommends pidgin-libnotify in both 18.04 and 20.04, but for some reason pidgin-libnotify doesn't exist in the 20.04 repository. I don't see any explanation for why this was removed, so I assume it was just an oversight.

Dependency exists: https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/pidgin
Dependency broken: https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/pidgin

Note: This seems like it might affect all versions after Focal too (Groovy, Hirsute, Impish, etc.).

Since using the 18.04 .deb is reported to work (see links below), I don't think any changes need to be made other than to build a release for focal.

Related:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1232938/pidgin-missing-libnotify-plugin-on-ubuntu-20-04
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pidgin-libnotify/+bug/1903788