Re: [9fans] irc client (maybe server) project looking for contributors

[Theo Honohan <theo@ideaworks3d.com>]

On Friday 15 June, Matt wrote:
>
> Okay, we're developing the irc thing at work. So while my head is full of
> irc stuff I'd like to take the opportunity to develop some IRC stuff for
> plan9 / Inferno.
> 
> I've done the bot but it was pretty simplistic.
> 
> I'm inspired to do a client (and I kinda promised ;).
> 
> Is anyone interested in contributing?
> Even if it's just at the design and planning stage.

(First of all, I'm not a regular IRC user, so excuse my total lack of
clue, and arrogance in making any suggestion at all!)

Things that I think could be cool about IRC support on Plan 9:

* an ircfs which supported a simple file-based IRC interface, and DCC
  file transfer in an obvious way.

* a "pass-through" ircproxyfs, which would provide detachable proxy
  functionality (like the existing "dircproxy") using an underlying
  ircfs.  It would be natural for this to provide an IRC server
  interface to the network, as well as the ircfs interface.

* a new implementation of the "Comic Chat" UI concept.  This was
  presented at Siggraph 96.  Regardless of how you feel about the
  usability of the idea, it's a lot of fun to mess around with, and
  a good demo.
  http://grail.cs.washington.edu/pub/papers/comics.pdf 

  Microsoft's implementation suffered from a number of problems:

  * the cartoons looked bad due to poor image resampling algorithms and
    primitive compositing; a version that produced nicer images would be
    a good way to show off the new Plan 9 compositing imaging model.
    (Maybe Reneé French could be persuaded to produce a character or
    two...)

  * the killer: Microsoft Chat produced offensive in-band annotations
    (hex strings at the beginning of each line) to communicate the
    emotions and personae of the illustrated characters.

    It's hard to see how to solve this problem in general.  However,
    within a small community of Comic Chat users, you could provide a
    kind of IRC proxy server which shared their annotated contributions
    between its users, and also relayed them, in expurgated form, to the
    real IRC network.  They could then enjoy the benefits(!) of the
    annotations when they interacted with each other, while still being
    non-obnoxious participants on a normal IRC network.

    Of course, you could implement such a proxy by creating another
    version of ircproxyfs which created and used a number of ircfs clients.
    Have I suggested enough fileservers yet?


I guess rather a lot of that hinges on whether you think Comic Chat is a
fun idea or not.  I can't imagine using it every day.  It has a high
wow-factor-to-complexity ratio, though.

If it's to be written in limbo, of course, you don't get the new
compositing model, so the comic creation side of it is a less attractive
job.

Theo