New staff member, heads up on UnrealIRCd 6 & support for UnrealIRCd 5

News about the UnrealIRCd project, including release announcements
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Syzop
UnrealIRCd head coder
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Joined: Sat Mar 06, 2004 8:57 pm
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New staff member, heads up on UnrealIRCd 6 & support for UnrealIRCd 5

Post by Syzop »

In this update I want to post about 3 things: our new staff member k4be, a heads up on UnrealIRCd 6 and the support schedule of UnrealIRCd 5.

New team member
Earlier this year k4be silently joined the development team of UnrealIRCd. We are happy to welcome him onboard! k4be has been using UnrealIRCd for more than 15 years. He knows his way around the source code and in the past few years he has been publicly posting 3rd party modules.

UnrealIRCd 6
We have been working on UnrealIRCd 6 behind closed doors since July. A lot of work has been done during the summer vacation.
Very soon we will be releasing our first 6.0.0 beta. Normally we would start with an alpha release, but not this time. We are going straight to beta because this release already includes all the planned functionality for UnrealIRCd 6.0.0. All of the major API changes have been done. A lot remains to be tested, but we don't expect major code changes anymore, just a lot of bug fixing, documentation updates, and so on. The exact features of UnrealIRCd 6 will be mentioned in the 6.0.0-beta1 announcement.

UnrealIRCd 5
An important reason to post this separate from the UnrealIRCd 6 announcement is that I also want to be clear about our commitment to the current stable series, UnrealIRCd 5. UnrealIRCd release series tend to stay around for quite long. The 3.2.x series existed for 12.5 years and UnrealIRCd 4 for 5 years.
The good thing about that is that admins have less hassle with upgrades and module coders can use a reasonably stable API.
The downside of maintaining (old) releases is consuming UnrealIRCd developer resources but also the need to provide support for them (on IRC and forums), users missing out of: new functionality, flexibility, more easy ways to do things. This time I hope we've found the middle ground between the pros and cons.

The UnrealIRCd 5 support schedule is as follows:
  • January 1, 2022: No new features in UnrealIRCd 5. Only (major) bug fixes.
  • July 1, 2022: Security fixes only
  • July 1, 2023: End of all support for UnrealIRCd 5
This means UnrealIRCd 5 will stay supported for another 20 months.

Thanks everyone for using UnrealIRCd and stay tuned for more news about UnrealIRCd 6 in the upcoming days.
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