The variable we use to keep track of the watcher of the ssl connection should be unsigned. This isn't really a problem in Pidgin, where we use glib's mainloop and GIOChannels because glib starts assigning the handle IDs sequentially starting from 1. But if an eventloop implementation ever returns a handle ID greater than the largest possible signed integer (2,147,483,647) then we won't be able to remove the watcher because purple_ssl_close() in sslconn.c only removes it if inpa > 0, and since it interprets inpa as a signed value then handles over 2,147,483,647 appear as negative numbers. I stumbled upon this when playing around with libevent, which can use epoll. My implementation generated a random handle ID which was sometimes greater than 2,147,483,647. I don't believe this breaks binary compatibility. And I don't think it breaks source compatibility, but I guess it might depend on what compiler you're using.