I'm not comfortable with this being an assert. If it fails then Pidgin crashes. I don't think a fatal check like this should exist in the init function of a prpl unless it's dangerous for the application to continue running. I can't imagine why that would be the case here. People also seem concerned about this struct definition: struct raw_chunk { guint8 type; guint32 length; gchar data[0]; } __attribute__ ((packed)); I'll probably investigate a little bit