Pidgin 2.7.0: Movin' on Up

Well, I finally managed to kick Pidgin 2.7.0 out the door, as most of you are surely aware of by now. There are several important things to note about this release:

• AIM and ICQ clientLogin issues have been resolved. You should be able to now use both clientLogin and SSL together.
• Our internal libgadu has been upgraded from something from the stone age to something much, much more current. This solves the issues that (primarily) Windows users had with not being able to communicate with new (> 17,000,000) Gadu-Gadu numbers.
• Our Yahoo and Yahoo Japan plugins now retrieve connect server information directly from Yahoo, just like the official clients do. This took me way too much time to implement, but I believe I've implemented a fairly stable and maintainable method to retrieve this information. During this process, I learned a lot about how Yahoo's authentication works and made some improvements there too that will make us look much more like the official client on the wire during authentication.
• ICQ now has X-Status support! It took far longer than it should have--I originally wanted this in for 2.6.0 but it was nowhere near ready.
• Minimum GTK+ and GLib requirements are now 2.10.0 and 2.12.0, respectively. This allowed us to drop some 3800 lines of code, much of which was the result of needing to bundle certain GTK+ widgets so Pidgin could function on platforms with ancient GTK+. This also makes use of many of glib's convenience functions much more convenient.
• The Windows installers have changed to be less obnoxious with respect to GTK+. We no longer install a system-wide copy of GTK+ and instead install GTK+ locally to the Pidgin installation. This may disrupt some GTK+ theming. The other big thing is that now, the default installer will download GTK+ and optionally the debug symbols (so there's no longer a special debug installer needed for crash reports!). There's also an offline installer that, while almost double the size of the default installer, I prefer to use. This offline installer includes GTK+ and the debug symbols. I prefer to call it the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink package (the kitchen sink in this case being spell checking support, which still must be downloaded).
  

Of course, any release I had a major role in is bound to have problems. I built the Windows installers this time around, and did not know that I needed to do extra work to make the online installer function. Thus, many of you complained (and complained, and complained some more!) that the installer didn't work. Even after Daniel fixed this for me, we still saw complaints. If the online installer does not work for you, try the offline installer. I tested the offline installer and it worked for me. I forgot, however, to test the online installer. I was more interested in getting the release out in order to (I thought) minimize complaints.

Additionally, after I cut the tarballs for 2.7.0, several bug fixes rolled in that will be delayed until 2.7.1. Among these are a couple minor annoyance fixes for MSN and XMPP. And today fixes for more bugs rolled in, including two for Bonjour and a fix for the taskbar entry (window) flashing on Windows. I plan to push out Pidgin 2.7.1 in a couple weeks to resolve these, and hopefully more, problems.

In the mean time, enjoy!

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