BitlBee, alive and kicking
As quin in #bitlbee said a little while ago, I stole someone's mojo and found an amazing amount of productivity when it comes to writing code, and it feels great. I'm quit relieved that I can still find plenty of time and motivation to work on BitlBee even though during the week I already spend a lot of time at the keyboard. This after not working much on it for probably at least a year.
I managed to finally do the IRC core rewrite + abstraction that I intended to do for so long already. It'll allow adding non-IRC frontends to BitlBee if someone ever wants to, and also the IRC core has the flexibility it needs to add many more features that I wanted for years already, and were impossible to implement without adding even more horrible hacks.
There's also a libpurple-based backend for a few months already, plus file transfer support (written by Uli Meis and Marijn Kruisselbrink actually, it just took me a long time to merge the >3000-line diff, fortunately Review Board did make it a lot less painful), all thrown into a bleeding edge branch called killerbee. It's code that needs a little bit more work before I really like it.
Also, BitlBee has Twitter support for about two months already (thanks to hard work done by Geert Mulders), and according to the application registration page on Twitter it has almost 500 users already. It's quite likely that many of those used it for five minutes and went back to a client with more features, but it's still nice to see.
Last of all, to help with the current lack/fragmentation of online documentation there's now a BitlBee Wiki. Its supposed to have easy-to-find docs about common FAQs, but the easy-to-find part isn't really working out yet since it hardly shows up in any search results. Hopefully this hyperlink from a high-profile weblog will improve that a tiny bit. ;o) Possibly the content is not that good yet either, so if anyone has something to add to it, by all means, please do!
With a 1.2.8 release coming up, BitlBee is totally alive - and is for almost eight years already. It's been a fun project to work on so far, and hopefully will be for a long time.
I managed to finally do the IRC core rewrite + abstraction that I intended to do for so long already. It'll allow adding non-IRC frontends to BitlBee if someone ever wants to, and also the IRC core has the flexibility it needs to add many more features that I wanted for years already, and were impossible to implement without adding even more horrible hacks.
There's also a libpurple-based backend for a few months already, plus file transfer support (written by Uli Meis and Marijn Kruisselbrink actually, it just took me a long time to merge the >3000-line diff, fortunately Review Board did make it a lot less painful), all thrown into a bleeding edge branch called killerbee. It's code that needs a little bit more work before I really like it.
Also, BitlBee has Twitter support for about two months already (thanks to hard work done by Geert Mulders), and according to the application registration page on Twitter it has almost 500 users already. It's quite likely that many of those used it for five minutes and went back to a client with more features, but it's still nice to see.
Last of all, to help with the current lack/fragmentation of online documentation there's now a BitlBee Wiki. Its supposed to have easy-to-find docs about common FAQs, but the easy-to-find part isn't really working out yet since it hardly shows up in any search results. Hopefully this hyperlink from a high-profile weblog will improve that a tiny bit. ;o) Possibly the content is not that good yet either, so if anyone has something to add to it, by all means, please do!
With a 1.2.8 release coming up, BitlBee is totally alive - and is for almost eight years already. It's been a fun project to work on so far, and hopefully will be for a long time.
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Aaron Toponce on :
I'm glad to see that Bitlbee is alive and well. Since I found it a number of years ago, it's been only client. Learning about Twitter support, and ultimately Idennti.ca support, was like opening new presents on Christmas. And now, running 1.3dev is amazing. You never cease to impress.
I'm a simple guy. All i need is Jabber/Twitter support, so I compile it specifically for that, and I'm up and running.
Seriously, job well done. Keep up the great work, but don't get burned out.