[AshamedCaptain]

Pidgin predates keychains, but if I remember correctly you had the option to set up a master password or to simply disable storing passwords, which were the only options that were truly incrementing security. But most users would not do that (they want autologin for a reason), so the example still applies.

(Note also most keychain implementations are not truly improving security in any way, but this is a separate topic)

[rw_grim]

For the full reasoning see this page https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/PlainTextPasswords which is now back online. It was accidentally broken in a recent server migration.

That said, purple3/pidgin3 (still in development) only supports for keyrings and doesn't try to do any password management on its own even though password managers fall into the "Store a password(s) behind a password" as detailed on the above page.