Roughly around the same time, we'll also release a 0.3.0 version, so people willing to play with the new stuff can get proper releases as well. The 0.3 series will be considered a development branch. Future will tell if we stick with that (i.e. odd minors = devel releases, even minors = stable releases). We plan to put a lot of experimental and exciting stuff into 0.3, so this series will probably be alive for quite a while (while 0.2 will only see major bugfixes in the future, but no new features).

So now we're back to CMake. You'll find build instructions in INSTALL.cmake (soon that will be moved to INSTALL). It has been tested on Linux, MacOSX and Windows. It is also much simpler than our old CMake-based build system, as CMake has evolved, removing the need for some of the ugly workarounds we had. Thanks to Flameeyes, we also finally have a "make install" that installs the binaries and .desktop files where they belong; soon to be followed by application icons. And last but not least, it's colorful and shiny :)

So if you happen to run buildscripts or similar, please migrate them over to the new build system, since we will be removing the qmake stuff in a few days!

You can access the public repo as follows:
git clone git://git.quassel-irc.org/quassel.git

Read on for the release notes for quassel-0.2.0-beta1!

There have been many bugfixes, some performance improvements and some new features. Most notably: The bufferviews are now fully customizable! You can create and edit views using the settings dialog (F7) -> General -> Buffer Views. Buffers can be reordered using drag'n'drop, you can hide inactive buffers and much more. All your views will be stored on the core, so you can share them amongst your clients. Please note that there currently is one known bug where new buffers will not always be shown in custom views. They are visible in the "All Buffers" view though and can be dragged from there into custom views.

Also nice to know is that we have now a flood protection (throttling your messages in order to prevent you from being kicked from the network), and we have fixed the huge lag that you might have experienced on some networks.

And now, get it while it's hot!

Have fun,
~ Sputnick

We have put the 0.2.x branch in feature freeze, since we believe that Quassel IRC is now featureful enough to be usable. We plan to release a beta soon, followed by an RC and the final hopefully not too far in the future.

While we keep using and testing and fixing 0.2.x, we have started work on the 0.3 branch (which is not trunk yet, since we don't want to screw up the people keeping current with svn builds). This branch will include a complete new message handling architecture on the client side, based on Qt's MVC classes. This will allow us to implement much more flexible buffers (e.g. containing merged contents from multiple channels/queries, a highlight buffer and more), and it should also be much more efficient RAM-wise. We will have yet to see how efficient that turns out to be speed-wise though...
This architecture will enable us to finally start real work on the famous new ChatWidget, which will just be a view on the MessageModel (or various filtering proxy models).

Another point on the agenda for 0.3 is the long-awaited plugin interface, though we are not sure yet how extensive this will be - if we manage to implement a full-flegged scripting interface in the not too distant future, or if we'll only provide a few hooks for simple plugins as a temporary work-around...

So while our commit count seems to be down, and our channels are a little bit more dormant than usual, rest assured that a lot of good stuff is going on behind the scenes :)

Back to work.
~ Sput

For a more detailed list of important changes, read on!

Bugfixes:

• Stopped quasselcore from potentially filling up your database with millions of strings when receiving invalid CTCP
• A saner autowho implementation avoids throttling when sending messages to some networks, removing that annoying send lag you might have experienced
• Font issues (garbled fonts, wrong formatting...) have been fixed
• Finally allow parallel makes (make -j)
• Made the core run on Windows[tm] as well
• Made Quassel compile and run on MacOSX 10.4 (Tiger)

Features:

• Custom highlights
• Lots of UI tweaks
• QuasselTopia compiles and sorta runs again... well, this is still highly work-in-progress and probably breaks again soon enough.

We will now work on finalizing the feature list and removing the last outstanding issues for Quassel's first beta release, which we expect to release in a couple of weeks.

• The backlog is now dynamically replayed from the core. This means as you scroll further up in a buffer, new backlog lines will be automagically requested and displayed. This gives you the possibility to scroll up "infinitely", well, up to the point where you first entered that channel...
• Server passwords work now. Just enter them in the server edit dialog (Settings -> General -> Networks -> Edit Server).
• Highlighted messages now make your systray icon flash and/or display a shiny bubble. Configurable under Settings -> Behavior -> General.

This release also breaks the core/client protocol (again, and it won't be the last time), so both your core and client need to be alpha4 to work.

Please note that we still tweak and break the core/client protocol on a regular basis. This means that your client sometimes will require a certain core revision and the other way round. For example, the current nightly clients do not run with alpha4 cores. Both client and core will warn in this case, but you should be aware of that fact anyway (especially since downgrades of config files or the database are usually not possible, so using a client or core that is "too new" might require you to upgrade the other component as well! You'll find even more disclaimers on the download page.

Note that this is highly experimental, since certain features seem to require a compatible shared glibc installed. Also on one of my test systems, charset encodings don't work, because iconv cannot be used even though it is installed... so please test it, and if anything is strange, please report.

Please note that we have broken both the client/core protocol and the database schema with this release. This means you cannot connect with an older client to an alpha3 core or vice versa. The database schema will be automatically upgraded once you run your shiny new core for the first time. Please note that after this upgrade, you will no longer be able to run a pre-alpha3 core with your database! As always, backups are recommended :)

So get it while it's hot! Updated distro packages and precompiled binaries will soon be available on the download page.

blogging live from CeBIT, Hanover, Germant, Worls'd largest IT fair :) This time I am not promoting Quassel, but I am part of the Amarok Promo Team. Be sure to check out the bestest music player in the world! Still using Quassel though :) While part of the KDE and Amarok people here chose to find some restaurant and eat, sven423 and me decided to enjoy the free booth parties :) Since we have only a few more minutes until security kicks us out for good, just a few notes:

• World's largest IT fair is unable to provide internet access during the day
• Booth parties rock! :)
• If you are looking for us: Hall 5, Booth E61/3
• Pizza delivery directly to the booth works :)

So much for now, hoping to get internet access tomorroy night at some point again :)

~ Sput