And hello to you, internet citizen, visiting the first post on the qTox blog! :)

The website

As you might have heard, qTox got a new website. You might be wondering why it would be needed, since there is already the tox.chat website?

Why?

There are several reasons. For a long time the tox.chat website served to qTox users instructions that are simply incorrect, if not outright broken. Affected are Linux and OSX users.

There are also issues with the tox.chat website itself.

Linux packages & OSX builds

Linux users were directed to tox.chat repository, where they could get only half-broken qTox packages (lack of system/DE integration, no useful information for debugging) or were told that their distribution is not supported.

Properly packaged qTox for variety of distributions has been available for a long time, and qTox’s README.md pointed to them.

OSX users were told that there are no OSX builds of qTox.

Well, guess what, there are OSX builds available.

Website issues

qTox aims to be available to as many people as possible. This requires support for languages other than English, whether it comes to the software itself, or its website.

The tox.chat website does not have any localization. It’s really sad when people who are unfamiliar with English are being neglected.

qTox’s website supported languages from the start. 48 of them currently, and thanks to Weblate, it’s easy for everyone to update current translations & add new ones. Both for the website and software itself :)

The blog

You might be wondering why a Blog is needed, if there is already one under tox.chat.

Well, this too didn’t work. The answer to a query about a post for the new qTox release was that there’s not enough to write to mandate a blog post. :(

So, a qTox Blog was needed :)

There are no artificial limits on posting to the qTox blog – the only requirements are:

• a bit of knowledge about making a pull request on GitHub
• Markdown formatting
• being related to qTox

To add a post, one needs to just add a file in the _posts/ directory, named YYY-MM-DD-Name-of-post.md in blog’s repository. For real world examples one can always look at other posts.

For more information about how to blog, the Jekyll docs might come useful.

Linux repositories

As mentioned earlier, qTox is available on a variety of distributions. This is possible thanks to Anton Batanev, who not only packages Tox clients on OpenSUSE Build Service, but also maintains pytoxcore – Python bindings to toxcore.

He even made a PPA for Ubuntu for arm64, armhf and ppc64el architectures.

Kudos to him for the awesome work!

Move to OBS

As mentioned before, packages from tox.chat repository didn’t work well, or at all and lots of distributions weren’t properly supported.

OBS fixes it all, and adds more. It provides packages for CentOS, Fedora and OpenSUSE, and makes debug information available as package that one can install.

Even distributions as old as Ubuntu 12.04 can get properly packaged qTox from it. Or CentOS 6(!).

OSX builds

A bit of old news by now – thanks to the awesome work of Joseph Krieger each new qTox version will be built on Travis CI & deployed to releases.

Repository

More maintainers

qTox gained 2 new maintainers, @Diadlo and @initramfs \o/

Pull requests to qTox have been going a bit slowly lately. As you might have suspected, maintainers didn’t have enough free time to review & merge all the new features & fixes by themselves. Now that the load has been leveled, reviews & merge should move more swiftly.

What does it mean?

Most likely more often releases of qTox, with more stuff \o/

One just happened :D

The move

As you might have noticed, repository has been moved on GitHub from under tux3 to the qTox organisation. The change nicely reflects that qTox is not a “one man project” anymore, but something developed by a vibrant community.

Branch deprecation

It was decided that the branch stable is no longer needed for anything, and might only mislead people. Thus it enters into a 6-months long period of deprecation, after which it will be deleted.

If anyone was depending on it for anything, they shouldn’t – use git tags instead. Or the master branch.

qTox 1.5.0 release

Video fixes, video fixes everywhere!

And lots of other things. There’s a nice changelog. And yeah, it is rather massive, since there were a lot of changes, improvements & fixes in qTox.

For OSX users, there’s another special release, 1.5.1, and again, no code changes from 1.5.0 :)

If you’re wondering what other things await in the future, there is a 1.6.0 milestone planned. It might look small, but it just shows items that new release will require – aside from them, everything that gets merged in between releases will be available in 1.6.0.

Incoming qTox update, faster, better, stronger than ever before ;)