Happy New Year - With Quassel 0.14.0!

Hi all,

again too much time has gone by since the last release, and I want to apologize for this. I've had different plans for the past couple years, however as all of you are aware, a certain pandemic has caused major changes and disruptions on both a global and local level, and those haven't left me and my private and professional lives unaffected. Without going into details, suffice it to say that it has been very hard for me to find both the time, focus, and motivation to sit down for long evenings of coding on Quassel (or any other private project, for that matter). We'll have to see how this might change again going forward; I still have many ideas for improvements and features, and so do our main contributors.

Anyway, I've finally managed to wrap up the 0.14.0 release of Quassel! A long list of changes has gone into this one, most of it again thanks to our many contributors, most notably Shane "digitalcircuit" Synan and Janne "justJanne" Koschinski, who have been awesome! Thanks a lot, and sorry for letting your contributions rot for too long at times... your help and support is always appreciated!

Highlights of the new release include the addition of many IRCv3 capabilities, support for the HAProxy protocol and for providing Prometheus metrics, improvements for the configuration of the core/client connection and ignore list rules, updated translations and icons, and a host of smaller fixes and improvements. However, most of the work has happened behind the scenes: After removing support for Qt 4 and KDE 4, and requiring newer compilers that support C++14, both the build system and the codebase have been thoroughly modernized and cleaned up. We have also moved our CI system to Github Actions, allowing us to automatically validate builds against several supported distributions, as well as automatically creating installers for macOS and Windows. We're not done yet with moving this almost 17 year old project into the present and prepping it for the future; for the next release cycle we intend to bump the toolchain requirements yet again, so we can move towards C++17 and more recent versions of Qt 5, as well as start supporting Qt 6 once viable. Stay tuned!

Last but not least, the move of our IRC community from Freenode to Libera Chat is now reflected in the code as well as the documentation. You'll find us in #quassel in case you have any questions or or ideas, or just get in contact with our community!

You'll find tarballs as well as builds for macOS and Windows at our downloads page, or soon at a distro near you. Please note that we no longer provide builds for 32 bit platforms, as those are not supported anymore by our tooling and demand has been miniscule anyway. Before you upgrade, please be aware that both the database schema and the config file formats have been updated since 0.13. Quassel will automatically upgrade both once the new version is started for the first time, however no rollback is possible, so backing up your data prior to starting the new version is highly recommended.

And now I wish all of you a very happy 2022, stay healthy!

Cheers,
~ Sput