I suppose that's a pidgin bug...

Oh, really? Well, then I will file a bug there and link this. Making implementations talk nice to each other is a good thing IMHO ;)

I think I have to reopen, this is what debugging in pidgin shows:

http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/3690

Asked tp-salut dev:

<sjoerd> Zdra: salut drops idle tcp connections after a while
<sjoerd> that other implementation see this as having a meaning is their problem
<Zdra> sjoerd: right, droping tcp connection != sendign chat state notification
<sjoerd> exactly
 gaim and probably gajim drop connections when you close the chat dialog, like iChat does
 but that behaviour is not standardized in anyway.. And imho a bit broken
 You might want to add these problems with gaijm and gaim to http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/SalutInteroperability

I checked Empathy code and there is no timeout to close the chat, so that's surely not an Empathy bug. So either it's tp-salut or piding, in both cases it's NOTGNOME :)

I think that's just about what to do if the connection is closed, does that mean that the contact left the conversation? Or does that mean the connection is useless because nothing happens, but the conversation will be reopened later if someone sends a message?