Good news to start the year: the new Psi Qt4 branch has been made public as a new year gift. Yes, another branch of Psi to keep track of, and I have a feeling that this won’t be the last one either 
. For those interested, I wrote something together about the new soon-to-be-mainline-development branch.
Let’s start with a bit of history. A few months ago, Kev and I went on a major programming spree, and did a ‘quick’ compatibility port of the main development branch, including Iris. What we couldn’t port, we just commented out, and left a trace that we need to revisit this later. After we got Psi to start up and stay alive for more than 10 seconds, we worked with Justin to move to QCA 2.0, which went pretty smooth. This is about the time where mblsha jumped in, and started fixing and cleaning up a lot of stuff around the place. In the meantime, Fran re-did all user interfaces in the options dialog, and fixed the chat dialog (which wasn’t as ‘compact’ as it claimed to be). And finally, Kev decided to reward himself by adding an option to Psi/Mac to get brushed metal windows 
We took the liberty of doing some cleaning up in the Psi soure tree. For instance, libpsi is no more: mblsha killed psipng (and moved all animation related things to the iconset classes), and all the rest was distributed over src/widgets and src/tools. The new uic also made it possible to rename our .ui files to a more sensible name (i.e. without the ui_ prefix).
While working with Qt4, we noticed that their Qt3 compatibility classes aren’t really all that perfect. Merely changing the UI files to use the Qt4 counterparts, and going through a little more trouble by doing a ‘proper’ port helped in fixing a lot of bugs. However, although Qt 4.1 is a lot better than Qt 4.0, it still suffers from some pretty bad bugs. We have reported as much as we can to Trolltech, and they promised to fix some important bugs soon.
But enough of pointing blame, what do we still have to fix ? Of course, all the unexpected segfaults that still show up too much. Help is greatly appreciated there. The contact list seems pretty messed up (probably no thanks to the listview compatibility classes), so we’re considering rewriting it for 0.11. Besides that, we’ll continue to try to get rid of as much Qt3 compatibility classes as possible, hoping to be able to ditch the 3 Meg library from our packages ASAP. Oh, and GnuPG support is also disabled for now, as it will be moved to QCA2 in the near future.
Bottom line, we still have a lot of work, and we really appreciate any help we can get to speed up this development cycle. So, if you care about Psi, and are not affraid to get your GDB hands dirty, don’t hesitate to contact the dev team to offer your services!