[Gossip-dev] New IRC account widget

[Martyn Russell]

Guillaume Desmottes wrote:
> Hello

Hi,

> As announced, I'm trying to give some love to IRC support in Gossip. I'm
> writing a new configuration widget for IRC accounts.
> You can see what it look like on
> http://cass.no-ip.com/~cassidy/files/brol/gossip-irc-1.png

The interface does look good.

> I designed this UI using my previous experience in xchat-gnome and
> trying to keep it as simple as possible. Most of users just want to
> "connect on FreeNode" and don't care about servers and other technical
> stuffs. That's why I put these in a separate dialog.

Yes, I agree with this point.

> We need a way to preset most common IRC networks. I consider to use a
> XML file to do that. It will look like something like that:
> http://cass.no-ip.com/~cassidy/files/brol/irc-networks.xml
> Users can define their own servers and modify existing ones. So, we'll
> have a system wide file and, optionally, one in user's home.

Yes, I think this makes sense. It also makes me think that perhaps we
should have something similar for Jabber. I recall that Jabber has a
list of servers available from http://www.jabber.org/servers.xml

Does IRC have some central place that does this too?

> Gossip doesn't manage multiple servers like xchat does (if the first
> server doesn't respond try the second...), that's not a problem, we
> could just use the first server in the list and ignore the others.
> However, I'd like to keep this UI as generic as possible to be able to
> reuse it for any potential IRC GNOME Telepathy client.
> To avoid to modify gossip's accounts.xml we could copy in it the first
> server of each configured network.
>
> I also need a way to retrieve the network associated with a specific
> idle account (for editing purpose mainly).
> I see at least 2 ways to do that:
> 
>  - For each idle accounts, we add in accounts.xml something (a new
> markup, an attribute...) containing the ID of the network associated.
> It's the more natural solution but we have to add an IRC specific
> option. I'm not sure if it's a big problem or not.

Yes, this is a good way to do it to keep things separate. I think your
XML file for IRC could be next to accounts.xml as something like
servers-irc.xml?

>  - We don't modify accounts.xml and search the network using the server
> recorded in accounts.xml.

I am not sure what you mean here. If we don't modify accounts.xml, what
is it we are using in accounts.xml to search the network for servers
with? Also, how do you search the network? is this some IRC thing?

-- 
Regards,
Martyn