[IRCServices Coding] Services 5

[Andrew Church]

     Looks like this didn't get through the first time, so:

1) No, because I have no clue how many bugs will turn up ;)  At this point
I'm tempted to say beta in February and stable release in April or so, but
I have absolutely no basis for saying that, so don't quote me on it.

2) The notice is intended more for lamers who say "ooh it's version 5!" and
rush to download it.  Feel free to use it on your production network, as
long as you take responsibility for any problems it causes.  There aren't
too many major issues right now that I can think of, but it's the ones I
haven't found yet that worry me more.  (One major issue I do know of is
that rehashing modules.conf doesn't work yet and could easily break
things.)

3) Not really, mostly because it would be a pain to set up and manage.
I may set something up once 5.0 has gone stable, but until then it's just
too much to deal with.  And I want absolutely nothing to do with the
piece-of-shit-formerly-known-as-Sourceforge.

4) For autojoin in particular, it was pointed out to me that not everyone
always accesses IRC from the same computer, which would make client
settings irrelevant.  In general, though, with the module system, I'm a bit
more lenient in terms of what I'll let in, since you can just disable
modules you don't need.  (And the reason for almost everything being
enabled in the default config is so you'll all test them for me. ;)  Some
will probably be disabled in beta/final releases.)

  --Andrew Church
    achurch at achurch.org
    http://achurch.org/

>Firstly, thanks to Andrew for releasing the alpha version. Hopefully he will
>not feel that he has to later remove this opportunity.
>
>A few early questions that maybe Andrew or the Alpha team might be able to
>comment on.
>
>1) Do we have any idea on time scale for development beyond alpha? I
>understand that it is a difficult question to answer given RL committments
>but based on work so far and this extended open test hopefully highlighting
>major issues quite quickly, might make it easier to provide an estimate.
>
>2) Despite the warning not to run the alpha on a production network, it does
>seem to be the best place to run it since it will give a much more realistic
>test of the code. It is also very tempting to upgrade :) To this end, are
>there specific known issues at this time with the current build that would
>make it completely impractical to run on a small production network? The
>"knownbugs" file does not seem to have anything specific to Services 5 and
>nothing serious mentioned either way but those who have already had chance
>to play with Services 5 may have a good idea of things that would make it
>unsuitable for risking in a production environment.
>
>3) At present we seem to be restricted to the mailing list for bug reporting
>and discussion which makes the process qyute closed. Has there been any
>thought given to providing some kind of online tracking system which would
>both show what bugs are currently known and their status? Maybe something on
>sourceforge or similar system would suffice.
>
>4) I was wondering about the reasons for AJOIN being included in Services 5.
>It seems to place an overhead on NickServ that has been handled by many IRC
>clients for a number of years. Even clients which do not specifically
>support it, but that implement perform can easily provide AJOIN
>functionality. Any client supporting scripting could easily manage an AJOIN
>list. A number of clients support dynamic AJOIN lists by offering to
>remember hannels that a user uses on a regular basis.
>
>Since part of the ethos behind IRC Services development is not to perform
>tasks that really belong in IRCd or in clients or could be scripted, it
>seems odd that firstly this system has been implemented and secondly it is
>enabled in a default configuration.
>
>Is there something specific that I am missing about this services managed
>auto join list which makes it preferable to the existing client code which
>already performs this task?
>
>
>Anyway, back to play around with the source some more.
>
>Mark.
>
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