BitlBee

There was a call to sethostent() in BitlBee that caused many people on *BSD some headaches. It was removed the day after 1.0.3 was released (yes, just one day late :-(), and there were no plans to ever release a 1.0.4 because by now the development ... [More] tree diverged too much from 1.0.x which makes backporting changes very hard. But since sethostent() is still a common cause of problems, here's a release to fix this (and not much more than this). [Less]

From the README file: "So when Wilmer got the ingenious thought in his mind while farming, to create an IRC to other chatnetworks gateway ..." That's exactly five years ago now. The first code was written that very same evening. It was just an ... [More] IRC framework, but five days later it could actually talk to people on MSN, and the more complex Gaim modules were added pretty soon after that. About two months later the first public release was there. With a lot more work to do, but even back then the Bee gained in popularity very quickly, more than we expected. It took a few more years to reach the 1.0 version number. Things may have seemed pretty quiet after that, there weren't too many stable releases. But the Bee is certainly not dead! Lots of cool things are happening in the development tree, including a Jabber module rewrite, finally adding the most important missing feature in BitlBee: Support for Jabber chatrooms. It will take a little while before this code will be ready for a stable release, but impatient people can soon download a new 1.1dev snapshot to try it out! Anyway, to celebrate the fifth birthday of BitlBee, here's a shiny new website designed by Erik Bosman. Thanks a lot for all your time, Erik! Most pages should work properly now, some might still look a bit funny. If you see anything strange, please report it by IRC/mail. [Less]

It's a long time ago since the last BitlBee release. Lots of things happened, but just in the development branch, which diverted too much from the 1.0.x branch by now. To encourage people to try out this new code, we decided to release BitlBee ... [More] 1.1dev. The 1.1.x branch will be a bit like what odd-versioned Linux kernels used to be (except that with BitlBee they should be pretty safe and stable, just with some rough edges). This code is running on testing.bitlbee.org and some other servers for some time already and seems to be pretty good. Two major improvements are a better (and more secure) file format used to store your accounts and buddy information, and a rewrite of the Jabber module. Also, for people who don't like inetd, there's a ForkDaemon mode now. It's like daemon mode, but every client gets its own process, to prevent blocking/crashing problems from affecting other users. Please try it out and report any problem you find! [Less]

Tonight (around 17:00 UTC) the machine that runs im.bitlbee.org will be moved to a different datacenter. Expect a downtime of at most two hours. If your ISP's DNS servers are well-behaved (and don't ignore TTL values) you should be able to connect to the server again around 19:00 UTC.

At last, we got access to the old user account files! Also, Tom Laermans/Sid3windr donated some CPU cycles and bandwidth to host the brand new testing.bitlbee.org. IOW, everything's up and running again, and hopefully stable! There are some ... [More] stability issues with libevent on Linux 2.6 (problems with the epoll() system call) so for now we'll stick with GLib for event handling. Apologies for the long downtime, we hope that it won't happen again in the near future! [Less]

Okay, things are a bit messy. testing.bitlbee.org is down for a couple of days already, and for now we can't tell when it'll be back. The machine was going down in the beginning of 2007 anyway, but just a few days too early the hardware died. ... [More] Currently we can't access the files on the server, but most likely the datacenter operator will give access to these files soon, so then people can hopefully transfer their accounts. Unfortunately we don't have another machine available to host this service. So unfortunately it's impossible to give an ETA. My apologies for posting this a bit late, I'm in the middle of a relocation, moved my server and needed some time to get everything back on its place. [Less]

The public testing server now runs a bzr snapshot of the new Jabber module, which also includes the XML storage backend. This means there can be problems. Possibly you're using a Jabber server BitlBee can't deal with yet. Also there can be problems ... [More] in the XML backend. Both the new Jabber module and the XML storage backend seem to be stable and reliable, but they both certainly do need testing. If you find any problem, please do report it! Also, if you have problems logging into the server your account might have been removed. Because the new XML backend is case insensitive when it comes to nicknames and the old one wasn't, we had to remove some dupes. See the MOTD for more information. Thanks to all the users for their testing! :-) [Less]

Today I finally merged the storage-xml branch into the main development version of BitlBee. There weren't any changes for a long time and the code seems to be pretty reliable. Hopefully this way more people will test it, so that it'll soon be good ... [More] enough for a release. It's not clear yet what the next release will be. Possibly there are still some more improvements that can be backported to the 1.0.x branch, but it's getting harder and harder because of many code changes. Maybe there will soon be a 1.1 pre-release for the impatient and curious people. Meanwhile the Jabber module is also being rewritten completely. Things look good. The rewrite fixes many problems we had with the old module and will eventually also support Jabber groupchats. The improvements right now are: Real XMPP 1.0 support (including SASL authentication and TLS instead of SSL), better handling of buddies using multiple clients at once, proper handling of SRV records (so connecting to Google Talk is just a matter of account add jabber [email protected] password), typing notifications (using XEP85, which isn't supported by all Jabber clients yet) and probably more. One last improvement in the new module I'm very happy about: Way more compact code. The old Jabber module imported a huge XML parser from Mozilla, consisting of at least 9000 lines of code. The new module implements its own very compact XML tree handler (and uses the SAX XML parser from GLib), and as a result the new module consists of only 3019 lines of code at the moment (compare this to the 13926 lines in the old module!). A bzr branch with this new Jabber module can be found here (or via hgweb). [Less]

It must pretty cold in hell, now that there's a bzr branch of BitlBee with file transfer support available! It's there for some time already, but it looks like a news posting is necessary to draw some more attention. It only works for MSN so far ... [More] (and only supports incoming file transfers). If you feel like trying it out, just give it a shot! Many thanks to Marijn Kruisselbrink (Mek) for implementing this all! [Less]

Sometimes it happens that some user accounts gets damaged when the im.bitlbee.org server is shutting down. We don't know why this happens exactly, but most likely it's because all (over 400) BitlBee processes receive a SIGTERM at once and there's ... [More] not enough time for all of them to save their accounts and settings. So if, after downtime, your accounts seems to be unusable, please report the problem to us by e-mail or on IRC (see the contact page) so we can fix it for you and to all the other accounts that got damaged. But of course, we'll do our best to make sure it won't be necessary. Hopefully giving the BitlBee processes some more time to clean up will be enough. [Less]