'man 3 ctime' says of localtime() (and friends): "The return value points to a statically allocated struct which might be overwritten by subsequent calls to any of the date and time functions. The localtime_r() function does the same, but stores the data in a user-supplied struct." purple_str_to_time() had multiple calls to date and time functions, although I didn't experience any problems in my testing I figured it would be better to use localtime_r() and provide our own struct. I hope I got this right. At least 'make check' still works :)