Konversation 1.2-alpha4 has been released!

July 04, 2009

Alpha 4 marks a significant milestone on the way to feature completeness for the v1.2 release of Konversation. New features in this release include UPnP NAT traversal support for DCC file transfers and chats, DH1080 key exchange support for Blowfish encryption and the ability to automatically split very long actions (i.e. usage of the ‘/me’ command) into multiple messages conforming to the maximum length of an IRC message (this was already supported for regular messages for some time).

Many bugs have also been addressed, including an important fix for invitation dialogs causing disconnects by timeout if they were not dealt with quickly enough - and not only is the rewritten dialog non-blocking, it also allows for handling multiple outstanding invitations in a single dialog, rather than a new dialog being displayed for every additional invitation received. Other fixes include further interface polish and robustness and correctness improvements to Blowfish encryption, the Watched Nicks Online system and the storage of per-tab encoding preferences in the configuration file.

A closing note for packagers: In this release we have replaced our custom implementation of the Blowfish encryption algorithm with an optional dependency on the Qt Cryptographic Architecture (QCA) library in version 2 or higher. By implication, Blowfish encryption support is now optional: A QCA2-enabled build will have it; a build not using QCA2 will not.

Changes from 1.2-alpha3 to 1.2-alpha4:

• Changed links to KDE’s (and hence our) bug tracker throughout the codebase to use https://bugs.kde.org/ rather than http://bugs.kde.org/
• Fixed the “Show Menubar” item not getting removed from the chat view context view after showing the menubar again. Also added a separator after the item (only visible when it is present).
• Switched the timestamps in log files to use KDE’s locale settings for formatting the date and time, as the equivalent Qt API used previously seems to look at the value of LC_NUMERIC to detemine the format in Qt 4, which doesn’t meet user expectations.
• Fixed the “Date” column in the topic history of the Channel Options Dialog not using KDE’s locale settings to format the value.
• Fixed the “Date” column in the Channel Settings dialog’s topic history sorting alphabetically rather than by date.
• Improved Windows support in the bundled ‘media’ script.
• Fixed the vertical alignment of the topic label when using Qt 4.5 (it’s now top-aligned rather than vertically centered, i.e. making the topic area bigger than the topic by dragging the splitter down won’t cause the topic to move down to stay in the vertical center anymore – Qt 4.5 is needed because a method to retrieve the document margin from the chat view to use as the top margin for the topic label is new in that version).
• Fixed various chat view messages containing date/time values (channel created, topic set, online since, ban info) not using KDE’s locale settings for their display format.
• Added support for using UPnP for NAT traversal for DCC file transfers (both active send and passive receive) and DCC chat. When UPnP is enabled in both Konversation and your router, Konversation now knows how to ask your router to set up the necessary port forward, and also how to to ask it to remove it later.
• Added support for the KDE 4 version of JuK to the bundled ‘media’ script.
• Fixed ‘/msg <channel> <message>’ not displaying the resulting message in the target channel when the user is attending that channel.

• Made the appearance of the line informing about the message being sent with ‘/msg <nick

  channel> <message>’ consistent between channel, query and status tabs (it now looks like in the former in the latter two as well).

• Fixed the visualization of ‘/msg <nick

  channel> <message>’ (i.e. the ‘<-> target> message’ line) being shown only after adding the resulting message to the target chat view (if present), causing an odd-looking order if the origin view and the target view are the same.

• Watched Nicknames Online now generally operates on networks by their internal unique IDs rather than names, enabling it to handle multiple configured networks with identical names properly.
• Konversation’s custom implementation of Blowfish encryption has been replaced with an optional dependency on the Qt Cryptographic Architecture (QCA) library version 2.

• The ‘/setkey [nick

  channel] <key>’ command now recognizes ‘cbc:’ (cipher-block chaining) and ‘ecb:’ (electronic codebook) prefixes in the key field to set a particular Blowfish block cipher mode of operation, defaulting to the value of a config dialog preference (Behavior -> Connection-> Encryption -> Default Encryption Type, the default is Electronic Codebook (ECB)) when no prefix is given.

• Fixed crash when opening links with ‘ in them when the “Custom Browser” preference is enabled in Konversation’s config dialog.
• Improved consistency of link opening behavior between the chat view, the topic label and the URL catcher (all three now use the new-in-KDE-4 KToolInvocation API to invoke the KDE default browser, whereas the topic label and the URL catcher were still using KRun until now).
• Fixed a bug that could cause the state of the spell-checking setting for the input line to be lost across application restarts.
• Added support for considering square brackets ([]) part of URLs.
• Fixed the code producing multiple JOIN commands for auto-join as necessary to stay under the 512 byte limit for a single command to take the length of the commas in the commands into account when calculating the distribution of the channels among the multiple lines, as well as not to list channels falling at the boundary twice, once in the current and once in the following line. In English: Fixed auto-join with a massive amount of channels possibly not joining all channels correctly.
• Fixed a bug causing re-joining of password-protected channels to fail on reconnects when those channels also had another mode with a parameter set.
• Fixed a bug that caused query lines written by the user that are so long that they need to be split up into multiple messages not to display in the query text color.
• Fixed a bug causing query lines written by the user that are so long they need to be split up into multiple messages for sending not to be displayed in the configured query text color.
• Fixed the status bar showing HTML data when hovering the contents of the info label area at the top of query tabs. The data was actually supposed to be displayed as a tooltip (just like the nickname list item tooltips in channel tabs), and is now.
• Fixed a bug causing the automatic away system to set the user away again on the next periodic activity check when no further mouse/keyboard activity occurs after unlocking the screen/ending the screensaver.
• Implemented splitting up of overly long actions (i.e. usage of the the ‘/me’ command) into multiple messages to stay under the 512 byte message length limit (in raw format) imposed by the IRC protocol. As with the normal message splitting, this is aware of how multi-byte/variable-width text encodings and sender hostmask length (which is part of the message on the receiving end) factor into the matter. Note that only the first message is actually sent as an action, the other messages are sent as normal messages - intentionally, as this seemed to make the most sense formatting-wise.
• Fixed the dialog box appearing upon receiving an invitation to join a channel causing a disconnect by timeout when not being dealt with by the user swiftly enough.
• Multiple invitations to join channels are now being handled by a single dialog box per connection, so that receiving many invitations in short order no longer means getting flooded with dialog boxes.
• Implemented DH1080 key exchange support for Blowfish encryption. You can use the ‘/keyx’ command to initiate a key exchange.
• The raw log now shows encrypted incoming and outgoing messages in their encrypted form. Previously, incoming messages were being decrypted before being shown, and outgoing messages were being shown before encryption took place, thus not capturing what was actually coming from or going to the network socket as is the intent of the raw log.
• Fixed a bug causing unrecognized channel mode characters being shown as their decimal value in the chat view messages announcing them having been set or removed.
• Per-tab encoding settings for tabs belonging to a connection to a configured network (i.e. one found in the Server List dialog) now reference the unique ID rather than the name of the network in the config file, making things work reliably across restarts even when there are multiple identically named networks. Encoding config file entries for tabs belonging to connections to servers that are not part of a configured network continue to reference the server hostnames.
• Fixed the “(away)” label in front of the input line, indicating away status, not showing up in query tabs.