XChat is dead and distributions are maintaining their own set of patches for it

[Aminda Suomalainen]

The development is dead and it has serious issues like missing SASL support and not supporting TLS. Networks are disabling SSLv3 and ZNC 1.6 which was released on 2015-02-12 also disabled it. Current configuration can be imported to HexChat with instructions at https://hexchat.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html#how-do-i-migrate-my-settings-from-xchat .

There appears to be some kind of patch in Ubuntu adding the TLS support, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to me that Ubuntu (and all other distributions) will maintain their own version with multiple different patches.

Server side Charybdis (where freenode's IRCd-seven is based on) has disabled SSLv3 and InspIRCd also released instructions on disabling SSLv3. https://www.notehub.org/2014/10/20/inspircd-poodle-psa
Freenode is planning to update their ircd-seven which in turn breaks XChat's SSL entirely.

This was originally a question where I was suggested opening bug reprort and my question on whether to just turn it into question is unanswered so I will do it now.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Kamran Mackey (kamranmackey)]

I kinda reported a similar bug to this last year at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-meta/+bug/1322024. Kind of surprising how they are still shipping XChat even though it hasn't been developed in over 5 years.

[Aminda Suomalainen (mikaela)]

It appears that xchat is not in 16.04/Xenial repositories.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=xchat