Atheme 7.0.0

Hi,

Atheme 7.0.0 is available immediately on the website, both in source and in windows-compiled formats. It comprises 1,350 individual changesets since the Atheme 6.0.0 release, and introduces 96 noteworthy changes (as mentioned in NEWS).

This release falls only a few days after the first bit of Atheme was written on April 17, 2005, which was 7 years ago. A lot has changed in Atheme between then and now, many developers have come and gone, a thriving community was built, the notion that IRC was dying and being replaced with XMPP has been successfully challenged, amazing (and importantly, commoditized!) web interfaces have been created for IRC networks everywhere to consume, the world's largest (by actual number of humans anyway) IRC network switched to using our platform, and the venerable Unreal+Anope software stack is no longer "the obvious choice."

But more recently, the most interesting changes have happened. Between Atheme 6 and Atheme 7, support for Atheme-proposed IRC extensions such as SASL have become obvious to client authors, with other IRCds and services planning to implement support for them. This is true especially in "cloud-based" IRC clients and on mobile IRC clients: SASL is supported by almost every cloud-based and mobile IRC client.

None of this would have been possible without the help of many users, but in particular there are a few people who have worked tirelessly along with myself to make all of this happen. They are, in no particular order:

Jilles Tjoelker (jilles), who has provided a lot of necessary grounding for the project as well as excellent code and engineering work. Without Jilles, it would have been very difficult to implement all of the features in Atheme and enhancements to the IRC protocol (such as SASL). None of this would have happened without his efforts.

JD Horelick (jdhore), who has done a pretty good job at taking the patches jilles and I commit to git master and backporting them into the stable release updates you guys enjoy deploying on your networks. What some people don't realize is that he has had another valuable service in the development process: he's really good at pissing me off. But all kidding aside, he vehemently disagrees with us on a regular basis which causes us to perhaps rethink some of the dumber design decisions we come up with. No one can argue that's a bad thing.

Daniel de Graaf (danieldg), who maintains InspIRCd, and has generally been extremely supportive of (and also involved in) the various IRC client protocol enhancements we are trying to push forward, and generally has been accepting of my feedback. For example, he removed m_invisible from the main InspIRCd distribution, which is a totally awesome win for user privacy.

Bram Matthys (Syzop) and Nathan Phillip Brink (binki), who maintain UnrealIRCd and have gone to major efforts to help mainline patches to ensure Unreal users get an equal user experience as they would on InspIRCd or a charybdis derivative.

Eric Will (rakaur), who released Shrike. Without Shrike, Atheme would not have been so easy to prototype. Shrike's availability was critical to the success of Atheme, because it provided a simple, easy to hack on, IRC psuedo-server implementation.

There's plenty of other people who deserve to be mentioned here too, but alas, if I kept namedropping people I'd look like a poser. So I had better just stop pontificating here.

What's important really isn't the past though, it's the future. If we are to continue to do great things, it is important that users be involved in the development process. To this end, we decided to approach the IRCForums staff to see if collaboration was possible. This collaboration is the beginning, there is much more to come. A recent forum post here asked "is IRC dying?" I think that we have come too far for IRC to die quite yet. As long as there is innovation in the IRC protocol, there will continue to be usage of IRC.

So, what now?

Over the next few days, there will be various things on the backburner merged into master (which will be come 7.1 for the short term until 7.1 is branched) and then we will backport some of this into a 7.0.1 release.

Overall goals for post-7.0 will be determined in the coming weeks.

For packagers targeting 7.0, there is a minor bug when using system libmowgli-2 with freedesktop.org pkg-config. Basically, it thinks 2.0.0-alpha1 is higher than 2.0.0. So, just change the macro in the configure.ac script and regenerate configure. jdhore has made a change to GIT that you can also apply.

Awesome, I'm glad it's finally out And I guess we can say happy 7th birthday to Atheme

Also do you mind if I quote and use some of this post in our news section, for the purpose of our news feed?

Go for it.

Gracias!

I just noticed something that you said, "

the venerable Unreal+Anope software stack is no longer "the obvious choice." - That is such a good point to make, as the obvious choice of IRC software has really changed from unreal+anope, and the likes of InspIRCd and Atheme are becoming far more prominent, I could probably name 20 nets that have made the switch to that particular combination.

Awesomenessness

I think we are all glad