🎆 Irssi 1.1.1 and 1.0.7 Released 🎆

Posted on February 15th 2018

Happy Lunar New Year from the Irssi Team!

Irssi 1.1.1 and 1.0.7 have been released! They contain some critical updates which we hope you'll enjoy. There are no new features. All Irssi users should upgrade to this version. See the NEWS for details.

For more information refer to the security advisory.

One of bigger issues that was silent to us was a bug in OpenSSL that has been fixed six years ago. It causes Irssi to crash. None of the developers were using such old software. Unfortunately, Debian jessie and Ubuntu 14.04 still use OpenSSL from before that.

The other important bug was that netsplits would crash Irssi when getting disconnected. Sorry for this bug. It shows that the netsplit code is badly tested since it doesn't occur so frequently. We could really benefit from some unit tests here...

An odd issue was found in the configure script. Our development box has a version of autotools that was patched by the distribution to fix a minor syntax issue. Unfortunately, that patch broke the POSIX sh compatibility of the generated files! (The bug is only present in the 1.1.0 release tarballs.)

Another invisible issue was that the test suite would mysteriously fail on sufficiently old systems. Turns out the required TAP output is only present in GLib 2.40 and later (and of course not documented). Again, no-one on the team was using anything older...

A surprising issue was uncovered when using negative numbers to manipulate window sizes. Let's just say Irssi totally didn't expect you to do this. (It will crash your Irssi and possibly show odd display glitches.)

Irssi 1.0.7 also includes a patch for some /server add/modify commands that could crash Irssi. This was originally scheduled for 1.0.6 but forgotten! Oops.

This release can be downloaded from our releases page. Binary test packages for various Linux distributions are automatically generated by the openSUSE Build Service and are available for download in the irssi-test and irssi-oldtest repositories.

Please check with your distro whether they provide officially updated packages.

We currently do not have any alternate advice.

In the meantime, the following interesting changes happened in the development version:

  • Sideways split support was added into Irssi (#697)
  • Ben Paxton backported code to colourise the input prompt, originally by Jonas Hurrelmann. This can be used for spell checking or nick colouring. (#764)
  • Manish Goregaokar contributed code that will add a colon behind all the tab-completed nicks (#822)
  • another take at the netsplit printing optimisations was merged (now with less crashes??) (#832)
  • the theme engine was added to Google's Oss-Fuzz and already uncovered several deficiencies
  • Niklas Luokkala added the binding that selects the previous completion during tab completion to Shift+Tab by default (#830)
  • Martin Staron contributed code that might fix storing of DCC GETs on Android phones or FAT partitions (#844)
  • CAP 3.2 capability negotiation is now supported (#775)

Feel welcome to join our IRC channel, or discuss this news on reddit or Twitter.

The Irssi Team.