BitlBee

Finally, the next major release is there! Almost five years after the last major release, it was about time. Who would've thought that this one would take even longer than going from 0.7 to 1.0 (which "only" took three years)? There are so many ... [More] changes in this version, including some very old major requests like a complete core rewrite, OTR encryption, a significant upgrade of the MSN protocol module, optional support for libpurple, file transfers.. The last one used to be the "Duke Nukem Forever" in the BitlBee community. Looks like we won! This all seems enough to bump the major version number. Since, looking at the timing of previous versions, it's waaaay late to release a BitlBee 2 at this point, let's go for 3.0 immediately. :-) This release doesn't come with the traditional "release speech" (see the speech that came with 1.2), but with a comic as you can see on your right. Many thanks to Randall Munroe for drawing it! For the curious, there's also a short screencast that demonstrates some of the new features. If you haven't tried the multi-channel stuff yet, do take a look! Anyway, go and download the thing. Many people were running this stuff from Bazaar already, so join the club. :-) Have fun, and thanks everyone for your continued support! (And in all modesty, let me remind you guys that we're also on Flattr. :-) [Less]

Finally, the next major release is there! Almost five years after the last major release, it was about time. Who would've thought that this one would take even longer than going from 0.7 to 1.0 (which "only" took three years)? There are so many ... [More] changes in this version, including some very old major requests like a complete core rewrite, OTR encryption, a significant upgrade of the MSN protocol module, optional support for libpurple, file transfers.. The last one used to be the "Duke Nukem Forever" in the BitlBee community. Looks like we won! This all seems enough to bump the major version number. Since, looking at the timing of previous versions, it's waaaay late to release a BitlBee 2 at this point, let's go for 3.0 immediately. :-) This release doesn't come with the traditional "release speech" (see the speech that came with 1.2), but with a comic as you can see on your right. Many thanks to Randall Munroe for drawing it! For the curious, there's also a short screencast that demonstrates some of the new features. If you haven't tried the multi-channel stuff yet, do take a look! Anyway, go and download the thing. Many people were running this stuff from Bazaar already, so join the club. :-) Have fun, and thanks everyone for your continued support! (And in all modesty, let me remind you guys that we're also on Flattr. :-) [Less]

Finally, the next major release is there! Almost five years after the last major release, it was about time. Who would've thought that this one would take even longer than going from 0.7 to 1.0 (which "only" took three years)? There are so many ... [More] changes in this version, including some very old major requests like a complete core rewrite, OTR encryption, a significant upgrade of the MSN protocol module, optional support for libpurple, file transfers.. The last one used to be the "Duke Nukem Forever" in the BitlBee community. Looks like we won! This all seems enough to bump the major version number. Since, looking at the timing of previous versions, it's waaaay late to release a BitlBee 2 at this point, let's go for 3.0 immediately. :-) This release doesn't come with the traditional "release speech" (see the speech that came with 1.2), but with a comic as you can see on your right. Many thanks to Randall Munroe for drawing it! For the curious, there's also a short screencast that demonstrates some of the new features. If you haven't tried the multi-channel stuff yet, do take a look! Anyway, go and download the thing. Many people were running this stuff from Bazaar already, so join the club. :-) Have fun, and thanks everyone for your continued support! (And in all modesty, let me remind you guys that we're also on Flattr. :-) [Less]

Finally, the next major release is there! Almost five years after the last major release, it was about time. Who would've thought that this one would take even longer than going from 0.7 to 1.0 (which "only" took three years)? There are so many ... [More] changes in this version, including some very old major requests like a complete core rewrite, OTR encryption, a significant upgrade of the MSN protocol module, optional support for libpurple, file transfers.. The last one used to be the "Duke Nukem Forever" in the BitlBee community. Looks like we won! This all seems enough to bump the major version number. Since, looking at the timing of previous versions, it's waaaay late to release a BitlBee 2 at this point, let's go for 3.0 immediately. :-) This release doesn't come with the traditional "release speech" (see the speech that came with 1.2), but with a comic as you can see on your right. Many thanks to Randall Munroe for drawing it! For the curious, there's also a short screencast that demonstrates some of the new features. If you haven't tried the multi-channel stuff yet, do take a look! Anyway, go and download the thing. Many people were running this stuff from Bazaar already, so join the club. :-) Have fun, and thanks everyone for your continued support! (And in all modesty, let me remind you guys that we're also on Flattr. :-) [Less]

The ui-fix branch was mentioned here a few times already, now here's the promised development snapshot. This code's quite stable already (possibly just as stable as 1.2.8), but needs a just little bit more polishing before it can be declared a new ... [More] major release. People who don't care about the last pieces but don't really like running code from version control can now download BitlBee 1.3dev as a proper tarball. See the changelog and the Wiki page for a full list of changes. And if anything does seem broken, don't forget to file a bug! If you use Debian or Ubuntu, remember that you can also just use the nightly builds. No need to pull stuff from version control or to compile anything. Just run apt-get and you're up to date. [Less]

All the stuff described in the earlier article about ui-fix (see also the wiki page) is now available in mainline, and running on testing.bitlbee.org. Expect a 1.3 development release soon, while the last remaining features/fixes for the next major release are done!

BitlBee 1.2.8 is ready! Most likely this release is the last one in the 1.2.x series. A lot of work has happened in other branches (killerbee, ui-fix, etc.) recently, in preparation for the next major release. Since that code diverted so much from ... [More] the current stable release branch, it's about time to focus on that. For now, enjoy extra bits of Twitter functionality, and some more bugfixes and minor feature enhancements. If you want more new stuff, feel free to try out the ui-fix branch now already (also running on testing.bitlbee.org) or wait for a development snapshot that will hopefully come out in the near future. [Less]

Over the last month I've rewritten most of the IRC core of BitlBee. This was on the roadmap for a long time, but more a long term plan. Many feature requests (the most important ones being separate control channels per account or per contact group) ... [More] were postponed "until the IRC core rewrite is done", etc. Now, this work is finally done (or at least nearing completion). The branch can be found at http://code.bitlbee.org/wilmer/ui-fix/. Debian packages are also available, as usual. The branch is based on the killerbee branch, so it also has the file transfer/libpurple functionality. Read more on the BitlBee Wiki. [Less]

Over the last month I've rewritten most of the IRC core of BitlBee. This was on the roadmap for a long time, but more a long term plan. Many feature requests (the most important ones being separate control channels per account or per contact group) ... [More] were postponed "until the IRC core rewrite is done", etc. Now, this work is finally done (or at least nearing completion). The branch can be found at http://code.bitlbee.org/wilmer/ui-fix/. Debian packages are also available, as usual. The branch is based on the killerbee branch, so it also has the file transfer/libpurple functionality. Read more on the BitlBee Wiki. Update (2010-06-08 21:31 (UTC)): testing.bitlbee.org is now running this code on port 6669. Feel free to give it a try! [Less]

Today I merged libpurple support into the killerbee branch. The killerbee branch is the slightly more bleeding edge branch of BitlBee. It has things that are fairly usable but need a little bit more polishing before making it into a release. See the ... [More] branch at http://code.bitlbee.org/killerbee/, browse it via Loggerhead or download it using Bazaar. Debian packages are available, as always, via http://code.bitlbee.org/debian/. Install the plain bitlbee package if you want the regular code with file transfer support for currently just Jabber and the bitlbee-libpurple branch to use any libpurple protocol module you want. For those who don't know, libpurple is the library used by Pidgin (and Adium, Finch, etc.), allowing BitlBee to connect to several instant messaging networks not currently supported by BitlBee (like Gadu Gadu and QQ), and adding features to current protocols that are currently not supported (like MSN status messages and file transfer support for most protocols). Note that libpurple is much heavier on resource usage, and may also be less stable. The native BitlBee IM protocol modules will always continue to exist. Bug reports for this code are welcome on our bug tracker, and if you have problems getting this to work, feel free to come to #bitlbee on irc.oftc.net. [Less]