It took us almost 3.5 years, but at last we managed to reach the important milestone: Bitlbee 1.0 is now officially released! We held a small release party in Utrecht this afternoon, including a formal release speech from Sjoerd (a blessed Bitlbee tradition) and pizza. I took some photos.
New challenges await us now as we continue to cleanup the various protocol implementations and start working on 1.1 and 2.0.
Wilmer announced the switch of Bitlbee’s source control system to bzr yesterday, so it’s finally official. This will hopefully make it easier for Maurits and me to contribute, and increase the number of external contributors.
After three years without, it looks like BitlBee is finally going to leave the dark ages and use a version control system that was not thought up in Wilmers’ basement. Up until now, Wilmer kept a master copy of the tree from which he generated nightly snapshots. The other two developers (Maurits and me) would then send patches against those nightly snapshots which Wilmer would apply. This sort of worked, but it wasn’t ideal: migrating in-progress patches from snapshot to snapshot takes a lot of time and creating incremental patches can be impractical as well.
Some of the objections Wilmer had against using a version control system, in particular CVS and Subversion (which I was originally trying to sell him) were the fact that they require a manual svn add for all files you create, a svn rm for files you delete and the requirement for setting up a special server. At the moment, we’re experimenting with bzr since it doesn’t have these limitations.
We’re probably going with trac+darcs for the new bug tracking system.
Doing a bit of BitlBee development again during the last few days. Wilmer released 0.93 yesterday, and we’ve hopefully now also tracked down the bloody 100% CPU usage bug we have been chasing for the past 6 months. That’s the last bit on the roadmap to the big 1.0 release.
I’ve also started on rewriting the Windows port of BitlBee as a service rather then as a user program. The current version was rather unstable, mostly because it had to deal with a GUI thread and BitlBee’s core thread which is not really written with threads in mind.
The Win32 branch is available at win32.bitlbee.org.
We held a bit of a BitlBee coding marathon yesterday evening, with all three main coders (Wilmer, Maurits and me) involved. We got a couple of minor bugs fixed, nothing big.
People keep asking us when we (or rather, Wilmer :-), will release 1.0. That question is easy to answer: we’ll release when all known major bugs in BitlBee have been fixed. There’s still a rather major bug in the current development snapshots that very rarely causes BitlBee to suddenly loop and eat CPU. Unfortunately, this bug is hard to reproduce (it takes several days on a heavily used server like testing.bitlbee.org). We’ll track it down eventually, I’m sure, but it’ll probably take another couple of weeks.
LinuxReviews has interviewed my fellow BitlBee developers and me. Interview available here.
(Update 16:55) Slashdot has a post about the interview as well.
Now that the last few bugs in the win32 version of Bitlbee have been fixed, I have brought up a public test server. Point your IRC client at win32.bitlbee.org:6667 and try it!
The test server is running the 9 Sept snapshot on NT4 inside of VMware.
