- quassel-announce - Quassel IRC List Server

Moving our Home - Good Riddance Freenode, Hello Libera Chat!
by Manuel Nickschas 13 Jun '21

13 Jun '21

Hi all, Since the beginning of development more than 15 years ago, we, the Quassel IRC development team, had called the Freenode IRC network our home. For the longest time we have enjoyed the network, its people and communities, its helpful and friendly staff, its services and ease of use. Freenode was the home of a large body of Free and Open Source software, also the home for communities close to us, such as the Qt, KDE, Gentoo or Ubuntu/kubuntu communities. Unfortunately, recently the situation has changed drastically. What happened was what many people call a "hostile takeover" of the Freenode network and organization by people who basically treat with contempt Freenode's original values that formed the core of the community, and a main reason for many projects to choose that network in the first place. As a result, basically all of Freenodes volunteer staff has resigned, afterwards many channels have been taken over by the new management, their former admins robbed of their rights and ownership. I don't want to go into all the details here; there should be ample information about this on the internet. As a starting point, feel free to read through the discussion (including links to various sources) that ensued in our own, the Quassel community, as part of a Pull Request [1] created to deal with this matter. As it turns out, the core of the former Freenode volunteer staff have founded a new network, Libera Chat [2], with safeguards in place that should prevent another hostile takeover to ever happen. Many projects have moved to Libera Chat, and the Quassel IRC team has decided to follow suit. Since we know the people behind the network, and their philosophy, we expect Libera Chat to continue the legacy of the original Freenode. And as a more practical consideration, the network setup, the services, the processes behind the scenes, all are pretty similar, and thus from a technical perspective, the move was rather straightforward. So going forward, you'll find the usual suspects of the Quassel community in Libera Chat, in the same channels they joined previously - #quassel, #quassel.de, #quasseln and so on. We will change the links and network list in the client with the next release. For the time being, our channels in Freenode are still open, but we expect participation of our most active users to cease, and we always have to expect a hostile takeover of channels by Freenode admins, so we urge everyone to join Libera Chat instead. Looking forward to seeing you on the other side! ~ Sput [1] https://github.com/quassel/quassel/pull/571 [2] https://libera.chat/ -- Manuel "Sputnick" Nickschas ("Sput" on Libera Chat) Member of the Quassel IRC Project - https://quassel-irc.org Come visit us in #quassel!

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Quassel 0.13.1 released
by Manuel Nickschas 18 Feb '19

18 Feb '19

Hi all, we're back in 2019 with a maintenance release for the 0.13 cycle, Quassel 0.13.1. Besides a handful of fixes and improvements over the previous release, 0.13.1 fixes a particularly annoying issue with 0.13.0 on Qt4-based systems where backlog messages would not all be fetched. I'd like to thank Janne "justJanne" Koschinski and Shane "digitalcircuit" Synan in particular for finding the cause for this problem, as well as implementing and testing the fix! So if you happen to run Quassel 0.13.0 on a system or distro still using Qt4, be sure to upgrade (or ask your friendly distro maintainers to do so), otherwise your chat history may be spotty... Official 0.13.0 builds for Windows and OSX already use Qt5, so they're not affected. Also any recent distro release should have done the migration already, as Qt5 has been out for quite some time. Quassel 0.13.1 also makes database schema upgrades more robust by making them resumable, and allows to configure the listen addresses for the built-in identd. Please see the ChangeLog [1] for a full list of changes. As always, you can find the sources, as well as precompiled binaries for Windows and OSX on our downloads page [2]. Cheers, ~ Sput [1] https://github.com/quassel/quassel/blob/0.13.1/ChangeLog#L16 [2] https://www.quassel-irc.org/downloads -- Manuel "Sputnick" Nickschas ("Sput" on Freenode) | (o< Member of the Quassel IRC Project - http://quassel-irc.org | //\ Come visit us in #quassel! | V_/_

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Quassel 0.13.0 released
by Manuel Nickschas 19 Nov '18

19 Nov '18

Hi all, we finally finished another feature release for Quassel. 0.13.0 is now available at the usual locations [1]. Highlights of the release include new branding and application icons, support for the Breeze icon theme, many UI improvements, decent support for IRCv3 features, containerization support and LDAP authentication for Quassel Core. Dozens of bugfixes and quality-of-life improvements went into the release as well. Much work went into better supporting mobile clients such as Quasseldroid, e.g. by moving activity tracking and highlight rules into the Core. Database performance has been improved, and the database schema has been made more future-proof by using 64 bit message IDs and timestamps. At the same time, we have kept compatibility to older clients/cores, so 0.13.0 can be used with previous versions. Note that on first run, the database schema will be automatically upgraded, which with large databases may take quite some time and temporarily double the disk space. Also be aware that no rollback to an older version is possible, so do make backups before first run! Please read the release announcement [2] and the ChangeLog [3] for more details. Feel free to join us in #quassel at Freenode if you have any questions. We hope you like the new release! All the best, ~ Sput [1] https://quassel-irc.org/downloads [2] https://www.quassel-irc.org/node/134 [3] https://github.com/quassel/quassel/blob/0.13.0/ChangeLog -- Manuel "Sputnick" Nickschas ("Sput" on Freenode) | (o< Member of the Quassel IRC Project - http://quassel-irc.org | //\ Come visit us in #quassel! | V_/_

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Quassel 0.13-rc2 released
by Manuel Nickschas 28 Oct '18

28 Oct '18

Hi all, the first release candidate for the impending 0.13 release uncovered some issues, the fixing of which required some more complex changes than we would have liked. Thus, we decided to roll a second release candidate. Please find the release announcement at <https://www.quassel-irc.org/node/133>. You'll also find download links for the various packages there. We expect the final 0.13.0 release in just a few days! Cheers, ~ Sput -- Manuel "Sputnick" Nickschas ("Sput" on Freenode) | (o< Member of the Quassel IRC Project - http://quassel-irc.org | //\ Come visit us in #quassel! | V_/_

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Release Candidate for 0.13
by Manuel Nickschas 25 Jul '18

25 Jul '18

Hi all, three years and several hundred commits after the last feature release of Quassel IRC, we're now finally in the home stretch for 0.13. Since this is a massive release, we decided to create and publicly announce a release candidate, so people can test already. Please head over to the release announcement to get more information, as well as links to download the sources and binary packages: https://www.quassel-irc.org/node/132 This is also a call for translators! If you'd like to help improve the localization for your language, please contribute via Transifex: https://www.transifex.com/quassel/quassel/ We will merge back any new and improved translations shortly before the final release, which we're expecting in a few weeks. Thanks a bunch! Cheers, ~ Sput -- Manuel "Sputnick" Nickschas ("Sput" on Freenode) | (o< Member of the Quassel IRC Project - http://quassel-irc.org | //\ Come visit us in #quassel! | V_/_

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Quassel IRC v0.12.5
by Manuel Nickschas 24 Apr '18

24 Apr '18

Hi all, today we've released Quassel IRC v0.12.5. Please have a look at the release announcement [1] for details, and at the downloads page [2] for getting the sources and pre-compiled builds. Besides more than a hundred commits worth of bugfixes as well as quality-of- life improvements, 0.12.5 also fixes two security vulnerabilities that recently have been discovered by chaignc [3]. We've notified distros already using standard procedures, so they should provide updated packages soon. If you don't use distro packages for Quassel, we highly recommend to upgrade cores running previous versions immediately, or at the very least, to apply the patches [4] and [5] to your build. OSX and Windows users can grab packages for 0.12.5 from our downloads page, as usual. As a heads-up, I'd like to remind everyone that the soon™ upcoming feature release 0.13 will be the last one to still support Qt 4 and KDE 4. Afterwards, we will remove support for those, and also significantly upgrade our build and runtime requirements. All the best, ~ Sput [1] https://www.quassel-irc.org/node/130> [2] https://www.quassel-irc.org/downloads> [3] https://twitter.com/chaign_c/> [4] https://github.com/quassel/quassel/commit/18389a7 [5] https://github.com/quassel/quassel/commit/08bace4 -- Manuel "Sputnick" Nickschas ("Sput" on Freenode) | (o< Member of the Quassel IRC Project - http://quassel-irc.org | //\ Come visit us in #quassel! | V_/_

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Quassel 0.12.3 released
by Manuel Nickschas 10 Feb '16

10 Feb '16

Hi all, it's been a while that we did a new release, and it's still "just" a bugfix release this time. Turns out that real life is still keeping us busy... but it's the good kind of busy, so there's that. Thankfully, we have a bunch of cool people in the community who contribute patches, fixes and features while the core development team is on semi-hiatus -- many thanks to all of you! Anyway, say hello to Quassel 0.12.3. Many fixes went into that one, and we encourage you to upgrade! One particularly nasty bug was fixed: if you have multiple users on a single Quassel Core, and use PostgresQL as a database backend, messages could be lost in earlier 0.12.x versions. So if you happen to run 0.12.{0..2}, and run a core for multiple users, you definitely should upgrade. A more extensive list of fixes can be found in the ChangeLog. A short heads-up: The next feature release (0.13.x) will be the last one still supporting Qt 4 and, consequently, KDE 4. Supporting two diverging frameworks (Qt 4 and Qt 5), and two rather different desktop environments (KDE 4 and Plasma 5), proves to be increasingly challenging. Additionally, Qt 4 has officially reached end-of-life by now. So once 0.13 is released, we'll take the opportunity to clean up the codebase and remove a few hundred #ifdefs, wrappers and workarounds! This is still a few months away, and we plan to add a long-desired feature or two to the next release -- but now you know and can prepare for life after Qt 4! That's it for today. Please head to the downloads page to grab the new source tarball: <http://quassel-irc.org/downloads> <http://quassel-irc.org/pub/quassel-0.12.3.tar.bz2> Binary packages for the various platforms will show up there over the next few days, and if you run Linux, I'm sure your friendly package maintainer is already working on getting an updated package near you soon! Have a nice one! ~ Sput -- Manuel "Sputnick" Nickschas ("Sput" on Freenode) | (o< Member of the Quassel IRC Project - http://quassel-irc.org | //\ Come visit us in #quassel! | V_/_

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Releasing Quassel 0.12.2
by Manuel Nickschas 01 May '15

01 May '15

Hi all, I'm happy to announce the release of Quassel IRC version 0.12.2! This version now fully supports KDE Frameworks, so Quassel behaves properly in a Plasma 5 environment. Other new features include an improved password hashing algorithm, proper unicode-aware message splitting for both normal and CTCP messages, improved handling of PostgreSQL database connections, a bunch of bugfixes and updated translations. If you connect to a 0.12.x core, you can also now change your core password from the client. The 0.12.2 release provides a security fix for CVE-2015-3427. This is related to an older vulnerability (CVE-2013-4422) that we had deemed fixed a long time ago; however, restarting your PostgreSQL database while Quasselcore is running would bring it back from the dead. Version 0.12.2 also fixes CVE-2014-8483, CVE-2015-2778 and CVE-2015-2779. All of these can only be exploited by local and authenticated users, and as such after discussion with several security teams were not deemed to be critical enough to warrant an out-of-cycle security release. We highly recommend upgrading to 0.12.2 or 0.11.1 (which contains only those fixes, but no new features). Please read the full release announcement at <http://quassel-irc.org>. Cheers, ~ Sputnick on behalf of the Quassel Team -- Manuel "Sputnick" Nickschas ("Sput" on Freenode) | (o< Member of the Quassel IRC Project - http://quassel-irc.org | //\ Come visit us in #quassel! | V_/_

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Quassel 0.11.0 is released
by Manuel Nickschas 07 Oct '14

07 Oct '14

Hi all, we proudly announce the latest release of Quassel IRC, version 0.11.0! The biggest changes for this release are full support for Qt 5.2+ (Qt 4 is still supported for some time), and a fully revamped build system. In addition, a bunch of bugfixes generously provided by the community have been merged. At the same time we also release version 0.10.1, which only contains the bugfixes over the previous version. The 0.11 cycle marks our switch to using C++11 in the codebase, so build requirements have been bumped. Please read the full release announcement at <http://quassel-irc.org>, or download the new version directly from the usual location: <http://quassel-irc.org/downloads> Cheers, ~ Sput

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A Bleeding Heart - Important Information for Quassel Core Hosters!
by Manuel Nickschas 09 Apr '14

09 Apr '14

Hi all, as you should have heard by now, a major security vulnerability was discovered in OpenSSL [1]. This does affect Quassel as well, as by default the connection between a Quassel client and core is encrypted using SSL (or, rather, TLS); in particular, it affects you if you run a core that supports SSL and is exposed to the public internet (clients, both monolithic and stand-alone, are not affected because they don't offer an SSL-encrypted service). * If you host a Quassel core, make sure to upgrade your OpenSSL to at least version 1.0.1g (or whatever your distro deems to be a fixed one), create a new private key and certificate and replace the quasselCert.pem file in your config directory as described in our wiki [2]; then restart your core. Since the vulnerability is in the OpenSSL library and not in Quassel itself, there is no need to update Quassel unless one of the following bullet points applies: * If you run one of the static cores offered on our site, make sure to download the newest version; we uploaded a 0.10.0 core built against a fixed OpenSSL version on April 8th 2014, 19:14 UTC. Any older version is vulnerable, as an insecure OpenSSL version was bundled. After replacing the core, follow the previous step to regenerate your key and certificate. * If you use our install package for Windows™, and run the core from this package, make sure to download the newest version. We uploaded a fixed package on April 9th 2014, 20:47 UTC. Any older version is vulnerable. First bullet point applies as well. * Our MacOSX packages don't bundle OpenSSL; they use the system-supplied version instead. No need to install a newer Quassel core, but first bullet point applies. That's it. Have fun securing your systems; I know I had... NOT. [1] <http://heartbleed.com/> [2] <http://bugs.quassel-irc.org/projects/quassel-irc/wiki/Client-Core_SSL_suppo…> Cheers, ~ Sput -- Manuel "Sputnick" Nickschas ("Sput" on Freenode) | (o< Member of the Quassel IRC Project - http://quassel-irc.org | //\ Come visit us in #quassel! | V_/_

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