From kde-community Fri Aug 11 19:49:50 2017 From: Eike Hein Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2017 19:49:50 +0000 To: kde-community Subject: Re: radical proposal: move IRC to Rocket.Chat Message-Id: <9e6a7027-93f0-0ce6-ec9c-218fec3cf7d8 () kde ! org> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-community&m=150248101318884 On 08/12/2017 04:22 AM, Boudewijn Rempt wrote: > On Fri, 11 Aug 2017, Boudhayan Gupta wrote: > >> Here's a radical proposal: why don't we just work towards improving the IRC >> protocol, make the protocol available over WebSockets, and try to push the >> whole thing as a W3C informational RFC? > > Best idea yet! IRCv3 is working on things like that, including features like chat history, replies, even edits. There's a lot of spec work there that's done or in flight. Frankly, most chat protocols / systems are currently conver- ging on the same feature set right now, arguably led by Slack and Discord (who copy each other's features in turns). The problem the IRC world has (aside from legacy cruft) is that it's less vertically integrated than others and has less momentum behind it right now. For example, if the Matrix community hammers out a new spec feature, it tends to be implemented in Synapse (reference server) and Riot (glitzy web client) quickly, which are codebases that are really deployed and really in use. In IRC on the other hand, Konversation does support some IRCv3 things, but only to the extent that freenode and znc actually support them, which is a very small extent compared to all the IRCv3 things you need to clone Discord. From the Konversation side: We've long had ambitions to make a Qt Quick-based successor UI to the current QWidget-based version, and did some preliminary engineering work on that last year (e.g. writing a prototype of a high-performance chat text display system for Qt Quick, with lots of nifty abilities like managing text elements as scene graph nodes and using texture atlases smartly). We'll eventually resume work on that. I think there's still a calling for a modern chat client built on the Qt/KDE stack - we've got a lot of goodies in Frameworks that align with its needs very well, and the desktop apps for things like Slack or Discord are just websites wrapped in Electron and giant resource hogs with poor platform integration. It's not-so-hard to do better, and the 10+ years of experience in making a chat app for people also don't hurt. Now whether that Konvi-NG is an IRC client or a Matrix client I personally actually don't care so much, because they're both free and have values that I feel are compatible with me and KDE. Cheers, Eike