Forum OpenACS Development: IM or IRC

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1: IM or IRC
Posted by Pascal Scheffers on 05/06/01 10:31 PM
Port-y people,

I would like to be able to communicate through AIM or something with other porters. I have the distinct feeling that this will help in our somewhat distributed porting effort.

Personaly I like AIM, but I understand that the GNU/Linux variant GAIM has problems every now and then. IRC would probably be best for all, as graphical and text clients exist for all relevant OSes (no, aim not going into that argument)

Another thing to keep in mind is logging of conversations (very simple with an IRCbot, not so simple with AIM), as we are bound to say things that need to be kept.

Who else would be interested?

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2: Response to IM or IRC (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 05/06/01 11:18 PM
I think this is a good idea. I don't really have a preference for client. I use windows and linux. Linux when I am actually working on OpenACS.
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3: Response to IM or IRC (response to 1)
Posted by Phillip Thurmond on 05/07/01 12:26 AM
I would recommend setting up a channel called #openacs on the
OpenProjects irc network.  The advantages of irc would be a central
place for everyone to meet, and a more collaborating emphasis than
the 1 on 1 approach of AIM.  As previously mentioned, we could log
the channel....  I would be willing to do this except that I don't have a
stable enough connection.  Any volunteers?
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4: Response to IM or IRC (response to 1)
Posted by Pascal Scheffers on 05/07/01 11:20 AM
Okay, it appears that I am repeating efforts started last year. See this thread.

Gregory McMullan has registered this channel with ChanServ. I am there now, with the assumption that he is friendly (you have OpenACS user id #7 after all) so he can make others & the bot channel-op. If others join me I will be there whenever I am online (read: pretty often).

I will setup an IRCbot to keep the channel open, but the services on openprojects.org include NickServ and ChanServ, so it doesn't need to do much other than keep a log. I will try to create/install a searchable web interface for that if there is interest in that.

I hope people will join me there. Here is some connect info:

All servers use IRC the default port (6667), the main server is irc.openprojects.net. This will, in true IRC style connect, you to a random server, which is probably not what you want - choose one of these regional servers:

  • Europe: eu.opirc.nu (7 servers)
  • Ustated Nites: us.opirc.nu (10 servers)
  • DownUnder: au.opirc.nu (4 servers)
  • Blame Canada: ca.opirc.nu (1 server)
Go to http://www.irc.org/links.html for a client. If you have trouble with IRC, contact me on AIM or email, my AIM-id is ppassccall - and I'll help you get going.

See you there :)

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5: Response to IM or IRC (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Feldstein on 05/07/01 06:19 PM
This may be a good time for me to reiterate my request to see
Jabber integrated with OpenACS. There have been several
threads on this with people having all sorts of funky ideas about
what could be done with the Jabber architecture, but personally, I
mainly care about chat and IM capabilities for now.
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6: Response to IM or IRC (response to 1)
Posted by Talli Somekh on 05/07/01 06:23 PM
I concur with Michael's request for Jabber integration. However, from what I've seen of Jabber's performance, I'm not sure it would be a totally effective solution.

There may be others with more experience running Jabber, and I hope they can allay my initial hesitation to say this is the perfect solution.

tal

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7: Response to IM or IRC (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Feldstein on 05/07/01 06:48 PM
What are the performance issues, Talli?
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8: Response to IM or IRC (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 05/07/01 07:08 PM
FYI, for those looking for a Linux AIM client, I've been using Tik 0.87 for a long time now, and it works fine, even though I'm currently still running it on a Red Hat 6.1 system with an older Tcl version than Tik says it needs.
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9: Response to IM or IRC (response to 1)
Posted by Talli Somekh on 05/07/01 07:11 PM
Michael, my review of Jabber is mostly conjecture. Other than the fact all of my clients crash regularly (which isn't the server's fault) but sometimes I have a hard time connecting to any of the public Jabber servers.

Also, it's not totally ready for prime time. For instance, it still doesn't have HTML support for in-browser chats. I think that's a rather important thing for a system like OpenACS. Eventually they ought to have it and better things like Voice over IP, but until then I think it will be a little short for IM.

However, it seems to have a lot of potential for an XML alert system. I'm more interested in seeing Jabber integrated so that we can take advantage of Jabber in creative ways.

talli

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10: Response to IM or IRC (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Feldstein on 05/07/01 07:39 PM
Jabber still sounds significantly better than what the ACS
currently has. What we need (hint, hint) is a volunteer to
download the Jabber server and play around with it a bit.
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11: Response to IM or IRC (response to 1)
Posted by Talli Somekh on 05/07/01 07:43 PM
Well, we already have downloaded and started playing with it because we would much rather run our own IM server than go through wonton capitalist imperialist pigs like Msoft. It would be nice if it worked like advertised, though.

Also, I believe Civilution (or at least Erik Rogneby) is real keen on getting it to work with the OpenACS.

So definitely someone will get it up and running. It remains to be seen how long before it pans out as a worthwhile alternative.

talli

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12: Response to IM or IRC (response to 1)
Posted by Michael Feldstein on 05/07/01 07:46 PM
Great. Thanks for doing this work. Jabber may not be quite
"there" yet, but it does look like the horse to bet on in the
long-run.