announcement

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Yet Another Important Update: Quassel 0.9.2

Hi all,

the last update in the 0.9.x series has been released only a few weeks ago, and now it's already time for another one. Besides various bugfixes (among those, Phonon notifications play sound again!), and a bunch of new and improved translations, the main reason for this one is, unfortunately, another vulnerability: with a carefully manipulated client, you can retrieve the backlog of other users on the quasselcore you're using. Proper authentication is still needed, so this will only affect people who allow untrusted and malicious users on their shared core. Still, an upgrade is highly recommended.

If you happen to be a distro packager, please be advised to backport (i.e. simply apply) this and, if you haven't done so yet since the release of 0.9.1, this patch to your packages, if you can't bump them to 0.9.2 for release process reasons.

Well, here's hoping that next time we won't have that sense of urgency again :)

Have a nice day, and happy updating,
~ Sput

We Have Mailing Lists!

Hi all,

finally (after years of pushing and prodding for it), we now have mailing lists for Quassel IRC.
While most of user support and discussions happens in our IRC channels (mostly #quassel on
Libera Chat), mailing lists have distinct advantages - in particular, there is an archive, and
people can chime in asynchronously.

So now we offer the following lists:

  • quassel-announce

    This is a read-only list, where the development team will send important announcements
    to. We highly recommend distro packagers to subscribe to this one, as we'll announce
    releases and other important information there.

  • quassel-users

    This list should be used for general user discussion about and around Quassel IRC -
    questions, tips & tricks, that sort of things.

  • quassel-devel

    This list is for discussion about development of Quassel IRC itself. Everything that is related
    to development should go there, and we'll share our plans and ideas there as well.

So, feel free to go ahead and subscribe!

Please note that this is my first time setting up a list server, so if the lists show unexpected
behavior or have configuration issues, feel free to poke me so I can fix it.

~ Sput

Mandatory Upgrade: Quassel 0.9.1

TL;DR: If you're running Quassel Core or the stand-alone, monolithic client with Qt 4.8.5+ and PostgreSQL, you need to upgrade immediately!

Looks like Qt changed the string escaping rules in their PostgreSQL driver for Qt 4.8.5, which unfortunately may cause database corruption or data loss if you're running Quassel Core or the monolithic client with a PostgreSQL database and that Qt version. Older versions of Qt are safe, as are the pre-built packages for Windows, MacOSX and the static core from our website. All other users (and distros!) should upgrade their core or monolithic build to the brand-new 0.9.1 version of Quassel immediately. Thanks in particular to Tucos and brot for finding that issue and its cause!

In addition to the fix for this issue, a number of other fixes went into this release, most notably several ones related to key handling for encrypted channels. Also, you should now see Quassel come up in your preferred UI language on MacOSX again (rather than in Japanese).

Note that because of the urgent nature of this release, we couldn't wait with the announcement until binary packages for 0.9.1 have been provided. Those will be added in the next few days.

That's it for now. Over and out.
~ Sput

Onwards and Upwards - Quassel 0.9.0!

Yes, yes, I know. Again I have been too quiet on this page, while several major changes have happened in my real life. However, things are slowly settling down, and I could spend more time on Quassel again during the past few months. And as usual, the community has been active as well providing patches, fixes and features - thank you all for that!

So without further ado, I present to you Quassel 0.9.0!

A list of the most important changes can be found in the freshly updated ChangeLog - improved certificate handling, improved OSX support, DockManager compatibility, channel-specific highlights just to name a few features that have been contributed by the community (special thanks goes out to Tucos, who is restless indeed).

Meanwhile, I am slowly continuing to refactor the heart of Quassel, which is the communication between the client and the core. My goal is to abstract the protocol, so in the future it will be easier to write third-party clients. Having a clean protocol abstraction is also a prerequisite for getting things like events and scripting going. Expect more news along those lines in the future!

Oh, we've also switched to GitHub as primary means for source code hosting and managing contributions. The main reason for this is that people were unhappy with Gitorious because it was slow, sometimes unreliable, and has a less advanced web interface. So please, if you like to send patches, use pull requests on GitHub - that way, we'll make sure they won't get lost.

For translations, please continue to use Transifex.

And that's it, I think. Thank you all for your patience and continued support of Quassel, and have fun with the new release!

~ Sput

We are back - with Quassel 0.8.0

Has been a while that this page has seen updates, as we, the main developers, are still too busy with real life to get as much done as we would like. So many plans, so little time...

Thankfully, we have some pretty awesome guys from the community (al, Tucos, johu, kode54, Fish-Face, to name but a few) who help out not only with support in our IRC channel, but also with triaging bugs, and especially with sending patches. So we finally managed to clean out our merge request queue and got a new feature release going!

Quassel 0.8.0 brings you the usual slew of bugfixes, a ton of new languages and additional translations for the existing ones, and a few new features such as syslog support, configurable tab completion key, improved desktop integration and more.

Behind the scenes, and hopefully not noticeable for you, we've merged the new event backend into the core. This is more or less a complete rewrite of how the IRC protocol is handled, and the first major step towards full scripting support!

So don't hesitate to grab the new release and get rollin'!

A note for packagers: The Qt 4.8 release introduced an issue with QTreeView handling that causes parts of the nick list (and sometimes the chat lists) not being shown sometimes. For distributions that don't believe in frequent feature upgrades, we've rolled a 0.7.4 release that only contains this and some other bugfixes, but does not introduce new strings or features. If your distribution backports Qt 4.8, we warmly recommend backporting this version of Quassel as well!

That's all.
~ Sput

Quassel IRC v0.7.3

On September 8th, the IRC was in turmoil because someone discovered and actively exploited a bug in Quassel's CTCP handling that would cause the core to crash when processing a specially crafted CTCP message. What followed was masses of users quitting from Freenode, because their cores crashed.

We found and fixed the issue within a few hours, and have issued a new bugfix release. We strongly recommend updating your core or monolithic client as soon as possible to avoid crashes. Client-only builds are not affected.

Tarball and static core are available from the download page; some distros have already bumped their packages, others should follow soon. Packages for other platforms are not done yet, they will follow shortly.

If you cannot update your core right now, you (this means, all users of your core) should add an ignore rule to globally ignore CTCP requests. This will avoid the crash as well.

Sorry for the noise, but bugfree code is a myth :)

~ Sputnick

The State of Quassel (or: Why Are There No Updates?)

Because people keep wondering why our repository has been rather... quiet for the past few months, and not everybody finds his way into our IRC channel to ask us in person what's up, I think it's a good idea to finally blog about this.

I can assure everyone that the project isn't dead or anything. But the main developers are currently quite busy with real life, mainly with thesis writing, and Quassel development needs to suffer for that for the next few months. We intend to get back to development full steam once these rather time-consuming commitments have been dealt with, and we still have some cool plans in store to make Quassel an even better client once we're back!

In other news, we did package up 0.7.2 quite a while ago, but we're still waiting for Windows builds, so it's not up on the download page yet. You can get the tarball at the usual location though, and also find packages for Mac and the static core in the download dir. Some distros (Gentoo, *buntu) have already been shipping 0.7.2 packages for a while as well.

In even further news, some exceptionally cool things are being done by some of our users. For one, there is a native (!) Quassel client for Android devices under development. QuasselDroid is still work in progress, but I'm told it's shaping up really nicely.
For Maemo/MeeGo devices, Sandro Giessl is working on Quassel2Go, which at present is a version of the standard client modified for small touchscreens. We intend to merge this into the upstream codebase at some point in the future, but for now he maintains his own fork.

That's it for now. Stay tuned, while I go back to my thesis writing, and rest assured that Quassel will see more development again in just a few months!

Bumping Quassel: 0.6.1

It's that time of the year again, when we proudly do a new feature release of Quassel IRC! You might wonder why we've skipped the announcement for 0.6.0, though. The reason for this is that shortly after tagging, we've discovered two serious bugs in that version. One could make the monolithic client try to select the PostgreSQL backend rather than SQlite; the other would lead to a crash on startup in some setups. Since we usually let some days pass between tagging and announcing a release, those bugs were found and fixed before we'd officially released 0.6.0. Two days later, we tagged 0.6.1.

There are several major features in this release:

  • Completely reworked client/core connection featuring the long-awaited reconnection and Solid support as well as a streamlined UI
  • Support for the new DBus-based system tray of KDE and, in some distros, Gnome (StatusNotifier spec)
  • Improved notification handling
  • Support for inputting formatted (colored/bold/...) text
  • SASL auth support (replaces NickServ e.g. in Freenode)
  • Several new languages and improved translations for alreay existing ones
  • Build system improvements

See the ChangeLog for a more exhausting list of new features. Of course, we've also fixed many bugs and optimized some things in this release ;-)

As usual, we'll maintain the 0.6.x branch in feature and string freeze at least until 0.7.0 is released. This means that we'll backport bugfixes where it makes sense, but don't introduce new stuff in 0.6.x versions, in order to make packagers of freeze-loving distros happy.

Now go and grab this latest release of your favorite IRC client!

~ Sputnick

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