So all the Kopete users will have noticed that I’ve just bumped it in portage, both for the standalone version and the two from kde-base. Reasoning? For the third time in less than a month, the ICQ protocol changed, or dropped some support.
So what happens? The stable versions are all broken, and I won’t be calling for a new stable for this, as we’re probably going to assist to newer breakages in the next months too. What I can only suggest people is to use net-im/kopete (that is not tied to the KDE releases and is right now ~arch only) if they want ICQ support working. Next time a patch will be needed it will be updated only on net-im/kopete.
Anyway, I have to thanks all the Kopete developers who made a really good job with fixing it promptly once again.
Now, for the “Why one has to bother to do this?” part, I want to suggest everybody here to use a Free as in Freedom protocol, an open protocol, like Jabber, as much as they can. We do have some good Jabber providers now, like KDETalk and of course Google Talk, that since a few months is interoperable with the other Jabber networks, and a few other (local) servers are listed on the Wikipedia page.
As the Wikipedia article also refer, there’s the problem of not having your friends on there. Well, just make them use Google Talk, Gaim, or whatever else, but let them join the Jabber network and you’ll be safe with protocol changes!
