Sputnick's blog

After being on a bugfixing spree the past couple of weeks, the Quassel Team proudly gives you our first-ever Release Candidate of what shall become quassel-0.2.0. Since the 0.2 branch has been in feature freeze for a while, you probably won't find much new stuff (except for the occasional feature that might have crept in completely unnoticed of course ;-)), but on the other hand you will also find less bugs than in the previous releases, so grab it while it's still steaming!

Thanks to Flameeyes, we now have an official presence at the very cool "Social Network for Open Source Developers" called ohloh. If you are a Quassel user, don't hesitate to stop by and show the world :)

After our switch to Git as our version control system, we now also have changed our build system from qmake to CMake. Long-time Quassulans will know that we already had a CMake-based build system before switching to qmake in the first place :) Back then, we decided we'd need qmake to support Qtopia, plus CMake was quite clumsy at the time (and our old build system was uber-complex). Now, it has turned out that we can easily generate Qtopia build files from any build system, plus in the meantime our qmake stuff has grown much more complex than the old system ever was - and it came to the point where qmake just couldn't do all we needed it to do anymore.

As of now, we have switched our public repository from Subversion to Git. While Git takes some time getting used to, it makes development easier for us, and also it is hip and shiny and new - plus what's good for Linus can't be bad for us, eh? :)

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

Yep, Your's Truly will be present at Linuxtag in Berlin this Wednesday till Saturday! As I did at CeBIT in March, I'll be helping out at the Amarok booth again. If you happen to be at Linuxtag as well, don't hesitate to stop by at the booth and say hello!

Yes, we can finally announce the release of Quassel's very first beta! With entering the beta cycle, we also enter feature freeze for the 0.2 branch. While we are still stabilizing this branch, we are busy working on tons of new features and larger arch changes in the 0.3 branch, which we'll probably talk about in another blog entry soon...

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

Got asked today what's happening on the Quassel front, since there haven't been many commits in the past few days, which, after several weeks of frantically committing stuff, is quite unusual... To calm down everybody: even though all devs currently are quite busy at work and in the so-called, yet mythical "Real Life" (which explains while we have gotten somewhat more quiet lately), we are still working on Quassel as well :) Read on for details on Quassel's current state and our plans for the near future!

It is with great pleasure that we announce immediate availability of what will probably/hopefully/may be the last and final alpha release before we go into the beta cycle. As usual, this alpha release brings you bugfixes and new features, UI tweaks and more goodies, and we highly recommend upgrading. Especially since we fixed a very nasty issue in Quassel Core... and yeah, the fonts should now be working as well :) Also, we can finally provide a precompiled Quassel Core and monolithic Quassel for Windows[tm], so you should now be able to use it without having access to a *nix server... And we don't forget the MacOSX Tiger users either and now provide a package that runs on both MacOSX 10.4 and 10.5.

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

We've released Yet Another Quassel IRC Alpha! Besides various bugfixes (the nick selector works again!), quassel-0.2.0-alpha4 brings you some real nice new features:

• 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.

We now provide nightly source tarballs, as well as a statically linked core for Linux, MacOSX client binaries and Windows binaries. Please be aware of the fact that these binaries are generated automatically from current SVN HEAD, which means they might be in an untested and/or non-working state. We do not recommend using them until you know what you're doing, but since people kept asking for them, well, here they are :)

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.