I have just upgraded Ubuntu to 14.04 and I was disappointed to see that the Empathy version supplied with it (3.8.6) still suffers from the same problems that were introduced in Ubuntu 12.10, where the contacts are huge and cannot be sorted by status... consequently I have to scroll down through tens of 'Idle' people I never talk to, to find the contacts I want alphabetically (this used to work fine on the version supplied with 12.04).
Version 3.9.4 carries some fixes to the contact list sorting, so I was hoping that at least this version (which was released in July) would come with the new Ubuntu 14.04.
Is there any way to upgrade to the latest Empathy version safely?