Konversation 1.5-rc2 has been released! (January 7th, 2014)

January 07, 2014

After a (too) long wait, Konversation 1.5-rc2 is hopefully our final bid for your aid in assuring the quality of a now-impending final release. Quite a few gnarly bugs have fallen since rc1; some of them long-standing, others were introduced along with the features that made their debut in the preceding test release. Of particular interest to many users will be robustness improvements in the Watched Nicks system and the lifting of certain restrictions on Unicode support that had been in place as a by-product of supporting older, defective Qt versions. See the changelog for more details!

Changes from 1.5-rc1 to 1.5-rc2:

• Fixed a bug that could cause the Watched Nicks system to report all nicknames as offline if the Watched Nicks tab had been opened prior to a reconnect, even if that was not the case.
• Fixed a bug where a URL with IRC Color markups caused to show colors, even if ‘Allow Colored Text in IRC Messages’ was disabled.
• Fixed a bug where spaces in the path to the pre-connect shell command were handled incorrectly. Tilde expansion now occurs as well.
• Clicking a channel link starting with more than one # character would join a channel starting with one # too few; this has been fixed.
• Fixed auto-replace not being applied to messages that are sent from the Large Paste Warning dialog.
• Made the action to manually apply Auto Replace work in the Paste Editor as well.
• Fixed irc(s):// URL support registration in KDE 4.9.3+ (kdelibs versions 4.9.3 and higher give precedence to .desktop file x-scheme-handler MIME type registration over .protocol files installed by an app, but Konversation did not announce URL support via an %u expando in the Exec key).
• Build fix for win32.
• Added a workaround for a rare crash on Mac OS X due to bugs in the implementation of Qt’s font metrics calculation on that platform.
• Fixed a bug causing changes of the ‘a’ user mode to set/remove Owner status on nickname list entries.
• Minor UI cleanup in the Channel Settings dialog.
• Enabled freedesktop.org Startup Notification support.
• Recent releases of Konversation filtered all Unicode characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane due to a confluence of grave bugs in the Utf-8 support in Qt. As fixed versions of Qt have now circulated for some time and are required to build Konversation, this restriction on Unicode support has now been lifted.
• Fixed a bug that caused the desktop notification (KNotify) event for nicks on the Watched Nicknames list coming online or dropping offline not to fire when notifications for the associated connection’s status tab were disabled.
• Fixed the bundled ‘sysinfo’ script crashing on non-ascii characters in /etc/os-release when run on Python 2.
• The bundled ‘sysinfo’ script now tries harder to determine the current CPU clock frequencies (it now looks at sys/…/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq in addition to /proc/cpuinfo).
• Fixed a bug causing the flood fill tool in DCC Whiteboard tabs not to use the correct color after using the color picker tool to set it.
• Launching the default browser when clicking on links now works properly again on Windows.
• Fixed a bug causing certain combinations of sorting and filtering in Channel List tabs not to work correctly, leading to partially unsorted list entries.
• Minor rewordings and cleanups in UI text and the handbook for clarity and correctness, e.g. the “Notify” notification event is now known as “Nick online”.
• More information sources are now taken into account to update Konversation’s idea of whether a particular nick is identified with services or not (information from IRC numeric 330 was previously discarded).
• Fixed a bug causing Konversation to attempt to PART a channel that’s no longer actually joined when closing a channel tab after having been kicked from the channel.
• Some included PNG image files were badly encoded, this has been addressed.
• Fixed a bug causing the file URL for an authentication certificate in the Identities dialog to be forgotten across application restarts.
• The warning about text in the topic editor exceeding the server-allowed limit now calculates the threshold more correctly, taking encoding and IRC formatting expandos into account.
• Konversation now depends on KDE Platform v4.7.0 or higher and Qt v4.7.0 or higher.