DC++ 0.880 is out

The first DC++ release that brings a few notable changes since last fall’s version 0.870 has been made available to download this week. Version 0.880 marks the start of a new era, an active maintenance mode if you like, that we announced roughly a year ago. Along with that line there are no new significant functional improvements to be expected in the foreseeable future – we focus on possible speed and resource optimizations, bug fixes, compatibility as well as to keep the program up-to-date security wise. So finally you get the first pack of those improvements with DC++ 0.880.

Here are the most important changes, the already announced ones listed first:

• DC++ is being released under GPLv3 from now.
• Binary distributions split to optimized and legacy with according hardware requirements
• Used a new updated compiler version for better performance that allowed optimizations for speed, compatibilty with modern Windows versions and more.
• This version introduces a new stable hublist server.
• Fully restored the use of an up-to-date GeoIP country database service, the one allows you to see what country a DC user is from, determined by their IP address. Country info display was absent or has relied on a pretty outdated static database in the last few years so this goes back to normal from now.
• Hublists caching have changed according to the joint proposal of all hublist server owners: downloaded cached lists are set to expire in 24 hours from now by default. But this simple method alone would break the original purpose of the hublist caching function which has been introduced years ago to help users finding public DC hubs when hublists providers are out of service. So now we implemented a change with the original purpose in mind: cached lists are deleted only if a hublist refresh is successful. When a hublist download attempt fails or the resulting list is invalid the proper cached copy of hublists are being kept (even indefinitely e.g. when the source server is discontinued).
• Added a safeguard to attempt outgoing ADC connections on IPv4 only if there’s no IPv6 connectivity available. So far this decision was based only on information coming from hubs which, in case of improper IP address information supply, could break transfers and searches in DC++. There is at least one ADC hubsoftware that has such a buggy behavior triggering the issue so this change actually fixes existing problems already experienced in the wild.

There’s also a few less important or unlisted fixes improving security, stability and usability; for a complete list of fixes as always please refer to the changelog or the list of commits.

The availability of this new testing release will be advertised for a smaller set of users who are running the latest stable release of DC++. If no severe issues arise, DC++ 0.880 will be marked as stable within a few weeks.