Have fun using this all-improved plugin and feel free to contribute patches
and other improvements to our mailing list! Although we all like to boast
about our great work, we're sure there are still bugs remaining, which is
why we don't call this release 1.0, but only 0.5.

Nevertheless, we feel this new MSN plugin is an enormous step forward from
the last 0.4.1 release and we recommend anyone to try out this all-improved
plugin. Please read the release notes first before reporting bugs, but please
do report anything not listed there!

Thanks for your interest in Kopete!

                        October 2002, the Kopete team <kopete-devel@kde.org>


CHANGES IN THE MSN PLUGIN SINCE KOPETE 0.4.1

- Ported the plugin to the new MetaContact API, allowing a locally cached
  copy of the contact list to be always available (even when offline) and
  to combine your MSN contacts with other messaging systems in one entry
  in the contact list.

- Added additional online states ('be right back', 'out to lunch', 'busy',
  'invisible') and the possibility to connect directly with a particular
  status (especially useful with 'invisible')

- Fix multi-user chat now the API finally supports it properly

- Fix a grave bug in Kopete 0.4.1 where Kopete would popup the 'new user'
  dialog for every user in your block list, asking whether you want to
  allow or block the user, often crashing Kopete completely

- Fix support for Unicode messages

- Fix the 'unhandled error 219' problem that caused Kopete to disconnect
  unexpectedly for some people

- Added possibility to talk with users who aren't in the contact list

- Incoming filetransfers

- As usual, several other bugfixes

CHANGES IN THE MSN PLUGIN SINCE KOPETE 0.4

- Added block/unblock user

- Don't show contacts from the allow list if they are not also in the
  friend list (like deleted contacts). Small problem: there already was
  a need to have a gui for manipulating blocked/allowed contacts, with
  this change this is even a bit more urgent...

- Hopefully fix a problem with an empty reverse list on a fresh MSN account.
  can't test, because by the time the recompile was done the reverse list
  was no longer empty...

- Fix a problem with MSN users no longer receiving messages. Apparently
  Microsoft changed the server so messages without an explicit font name are
  no longer passed on.

- Fixed UTF8 handling not really being UTF8. MSN should work fine now with
  all unicode characters

- Moved the plugin to use KGenericFactory as preparation for more KDE-style
  plugin handling (as opposed to the current custom code)

- Fixed crash when disconnecting while an earlier connect was still running

- Made the connect code asynchronous, so connecting doesn't hang kopete
  while processing

- Fixed minor memory leak in the connect code

CHANGES IN THE MSN PLUGIN SINCE KOPETE 0.3

Many things changed since 0.3. I won't mention them all, because so much of
the internal code changed that the individual commits often fix more than I
was even aware of at that time. Below are the bigger changes and fixes:

- Ported the plugin to the new KopeteMessageManager. This move unifies the
  handling of various resources like chat windows, balloons, system tray
  flashing, and more. In Kopete 0.3 this was the exclusive domain of the
  ICQ plugin, in this release all plugins except IRC already use the shared
  code.

- Rewrote almost all of the internal protocol handling, fixing an awful lot
  of bugs during the process. The main goal was to make the code more
  maintainable and extensible, but the gratuitous bug fixes are of course
  much more useful for most people. The most important fix of all is a
  grave bug that caused the plugin to read a fixed-size 1kb buffer in Kopete
  0.3 without checking for additional data, often causing the plugin to
  seemingly 'hang'.

- Added the ability to change the display name while connected. This can
  currently only be done from the context menu. The option in the
  preferences never worked, and still does not do what you'd expect it to
  do. Sorry :)

- Added much more useful debug code for developers, testers and other
  interested people. It is also a lot *more* debug output, so if you're
  scared of console output, better not start Kopete from it...

- All those tiny bugfixes of which I don't even know whether they fix
  regressions introduced during the development of version 0.4, or whether
  they fix long-standing bugs.

