You can get around the the maemo-select-menu-location problem by adding my repository (see the details at qole.org) which has a dummy package by that name. I don't recommend leaving my repo enabled, but if you're getting stuff from extras-devel, then you're at the appropriate risk level to add my repo as well

But unless there's something very specific in Pidgin that you want, get the telepathy-haze account plugins instead. They integrate very nicely into the framework and they mostly work.