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It is reasonable to raise the point that building FOSS software while using a closed piece of software as a core tool bears consideration. However, I am 25 and

It is reasonable to raise the point that building FOSS software while using a closed piece of software as a core tool bears consideration. However, I am 25 and largely missed the boat on irc. I decided to start using it ~1 year ago. It is hard to use, but we will look at that in a minute. Often, we assume people have as clear an idea of what we are talking about as we do. That is often not the case. Let's explore IRC now. * Integration has never been a problem ... build bots. I feel silly and naive, should I know how to set this up? Maybe it is really easy and well documented, and I am an edge case here, but i don't know how to do this. I clicked 3 buttons to setup github for slack. It was very easy and I didn't haystack through building a solution to something that exists. Scope creep on tooling is dangerous as an aside. Thos takes that off the table. * persistence again, I have to set up an alternate tool to download the content. i assume this would backup the whole channel so any user could reference it, but it comes by default for free with slack. if each user must have a seperate tool, or go to a seperate place to see a conversation (which may be less searchable) it adds friction. * code snippets actually super reasonable to use pastebin. slack is at least as annoying for code as pastebin, if not more. * etc The point is, not everyone lnows as much as the author about IRC who is likely quite a talented developer who grew up on it. An 18 year old likely won't have used irc as much as older generations given the plethora of tools and chat clients. FOSS is a choice and a philosophy and that should be given some degree of consideration. Utility, workflow and getting new devs onboard and contributing is important. I agree with the author that it bears consideration, but slack or hipchat are much easier than IRC.

chris_wot 11y ago
For buildbots, it's not that hard. See http://docs.buildbot.net/current/tutorial/index.html http://docs.buildbot.net/current/tutorial/index.html Instead of using slack, use IRC Cloud.
- ebiester 11y ago
  Does IRC Cloud allow new employees to get the entire history of the channel? I can't see how it would from looking at its page.
  - scrollaway 11y ago
    I don't believe so, but you should look into IRCv3. We need to fix this problem at the root. http://ircv3.net/ http://ircv3.net/
    - synthmeat 11y ago
      That page/project desparately needs a bullet point list of what it wants to fix with IRC.
      - scrollaway 11y ago
        Agreed, but here is the list of specs: http://ircv3.net/irc/ http://ircv3.net/irc/
        rspeer 11y ago
        I don't understand what on that page would let you read messages people sent while you're not connected, or let you participate in IRC over an unreliable connection such as a mobile network.
  - okasaki 11y ago
    Why do people talk like this is some impossible feat for IRC? 1. Have a bot that's in the channel from the start 2. cd into the bot's log directory and type python -m SimpleHTTPServer 3. put the url into the channel topic How do some developers fail to rise up to this level of problem solving? I am amazed.
    - enraged_camel 11y ago
      I'm a developer. The problem is not that I'm "failing to rise up to this level of problem-solving". The problem is how much free time I have, and whether I can afford distractions from my main project to fiddle with IRC and get it to do what I want. We use Slack because "it just works". You get invited, you join, and BAM! You're done. There is one uniform client for all platforms and a bazillion integrations already developed for you. And creating your own is usually a simple matter of sending a POST request to a channel's webhook using a unique token. Essentially it comes down to this: IRC is a protocol that requires a fair amount of research and configuration to make it do exactly what you want it to do. Slack is a product that comes with the vast majority of features most teams need. That's why a ton of people are gravitating towards the latter.
tabbott 11y ago
It's worth mentioning that Zulip (https://zulip.org/ https://zulip.org/) is a new open source option that has basically all the features IRC/Slack does. So using open source tools for open source development doesn't have to mean dealing with IRC's limitations. (I'm one of the Zulip maintainers; happy to answer any questions about it).
- brazzledazzle 11y ago
  I've been meaning to give Zulip a try. How many users can it handle? Less importantly: What would you say its biggest missing feature is vs Slack? And conversely what does it bring to the table that Slack can't touch yet?
  - cpitman 11y ago
    IMO, push notifications for mobile applications is a big hole. It's not an easy problem to solve, but as of right now I believe you have to release your own flavor of the mobile applications for this to work.
    - tabbott 11y ago
      Yeah, the mobile apps support that on zulip.com but work needs to be done to make that work with running your own Zulip server...
  - ekimekim 11y ago
    I'll field the latter. I've used both Zulip and Slack in small team (5-20 people) settings and I much prefer Zulip. In particular I like how the zulip UI is single-stream by default. Messages from different channels are interleaved, so you can read all new messages at a glance, but still well separated by visual elements including color - I don't find it confusing. And I can focus down to any particular channel , or reply to that channel, in one click. It goes all-in on this "many streams, one view" model with the concept of topics - lightweight "subject headers" for individual sub-streams of a channel. This neatly avoids the "two conversations at once" problems that can occur in other systems occasionally. Some more minor points are a wider range of markup available than slack (including syntax highlighting for code), and better support for short-lived private groups (ie. "a PM between Alice, Bob and Charlie") As to what I think Slack does better: More one-click integrations (and likely other backend admin stuff that I don't see as a simple user). AFAIK Zulip doesn't have an irc gateway. Also when I last used it (over a year ago) Zulip's mobile client was quite poor. I'm sure others can come up with more differences - to be honest I tend to treat slack as "slightly smarter irc" so I don't pay attention to all the bells and whistles. Finally I should caveat that these same features I like are things people dislike about Zulip - it's more dissimilar to existing solutions and people will always have their preferred ways of doing things. I personally find Zulip amazing for me.
BoxFour 11y ago
Ehh, as someone your age (a couple years younger even), I have a completely different take on IRC. It's incredibly intuitive because it's so similar to all the other chat clients we grew up with (presumably because they're based on IRC). Sure, figuring out bouncers and build bots is a little tricky at first, but so what? That's the fun part. It's kinda fun digging into the IRC protocol and figuring out how it works. And ok, if that's not fun for you, there are plenty of really "click and install" tools for you (e.g. ZNC is super easy to setup). Not to sound like an elitist prick, but if you can't figure out how to setup an IRC bouncer, I'm not sure I really trust you contributing to the linux kernel, yaknow? Reducing friction is great: But the kind of friction we should be trying to reduce is bureaucratic friction. Throwing out PRs and yelling at people because they forgot to cc some particular maintainer - that's the kind of friction that sucks. Having to setup an IRC bouncer? Idk, I think that's fine.
- detaro 11y ago
  Same age group: Which chat systems were similar to IRC, but not to Slack, outside of IRC clients? And just because someone doesn't want to spend the time fiddling with IRC bouncers, IRC bots, getting clients to display things nicely doesn't mean that they are a bad developer. Just that they have different priorities for their time than you. I'm not saying that Slack is perfect or frictionless, but neither is IRC. And especially if you don't do it all the time, getting people set up to work with Slack is way easier than IRC. I really find these discussions half amusing and half depressing. 2 sides have something that is "good enough", both insist that nearly all you want can be solved with their solution, especially if you just do X1,X2,X3,Y1,Y5, and Z4 and you technically could build something that is perfect for both on top: but sadly (and understandably) no-one actually cares enough to do so. Because what they have is "good enough"(TM).
  - BoxFour 11y ago
    > Which chat systems were similar to IRC, but not to Slack, outside of IRC clients? Slack is very similar to IRC at its core, so I'm not sure I see what you're asking here. I meant that IRC isn't foreign or alien to anyone who's familiar with chat clients - the basic concept of servers and channels and nicknames is pretty universal. > And just because someone doesn't want to spend the time fiddling with IRC bouncers, IRC bots, getting clients to display things nicely doesn't mean that they are a bad developer. I feel like I covered this point already: > And ok, if that's not fun for you, there are plenty of really "click and install" tools for you (e.g. ZNC is super easy to setup). > And especially if you don't do it all the time, getting people set up to work with Slack is way easier than IRC. What are you referring to here by "getting people setup"? Like a corporate environment? It's fairly easy to setup bouncers and the like in a corporate environment using tools like chef, etc. I really don't feel like this is a strong argument for a corporate setting. If you mean on a personal level for individual contributors to get up and running on contributing to FOSS, sure it's not 100% frictionless - but pretty much. Again, there are lots of bouncers that can be setup with <5 commands. If the argument is that it takes an extra ten minutes to install ZNC vs. Slack, then I dunno - I guess I don't see that as very much friction when the tradeoff is using non-free software. > I really find these discussions half amusing and half depressing I feel the same way, but for different reasons. It's a little depressing to me how averse people are to spending 10 extra minutes to use FOSS, usually under the guise of "I have different priorities." I thought developers in the wild would at least be slightly more willing to invest the time, especially post-Snowden, to use FOSS. I guess that was just a college pipe-dream of mine.
jerrac 11y ago
I actively avoided IRC for years. I still avoid it whenever possible. And I've been developing and sysadmining for the web for more than 10 years now. Frankly, it boils down to that I just don't like it. I'm more interested in getting better at programming, or learning about containers, or some other useful thing, than trying to figure out IRC's odd interface. Chat isn't something I should have to think about. It should just work. So, I agree with most of what @vonklaus said, and disagree with the links pro-irc stance. I've never used Slack, so I have no opinion on it.
- lectrick 11y ago
  You can master IRC with a few basic commands. In fact I rarely have to use anything more than /join, /leave and /msg <someone>. /me <some text> for announcing an action. That's about it. (It probably helps that a lot of in-game chat interfaces use a lot of these same commands, as I'm a gamer as well as a programmer.) There's a pretty nice web interface to IRC called irccloud.com which also persists your connection (so you can simply log onto irccloud.com somewhere else, and entire history is preserved).
MichaelGG 11y ago
Given how terrible the HipChat client is on Windows, it's really saying a lot that people end up choosing that over IRC. Maybe Freenode could implement an enhanced IRC protocol and clients could opt-in to that. I know at least one project that was very active on IRC, and they moved to HipChat for convenience. They also went full-on with the entire Atlassian stack (again, the fact anyone would choose JIRA is damning against everything else.)

chris_wot 11y ago

For buildbots, it's not that hard. See http://docs.buildbot.net/current/tutorial/index.html http://docs.buildbot.net/current/tutorial/index.html Instead of using slack, use IRC Cloud.

ebiester 11y ago
Does IRC Cloud allow new employees to get the entire history of the channel? I can't see how it would from looking at its page.
- scrollaway 11y ago
  I don't believe so, but you should look into IRCv3. We need to fix this problem at the root. http://ircv3.net/ http://ircv3.net/
  - synthmeat 11y ago
    That page/project desparately needs a bullet point list of what it wants to fix with IRC.
    - scrollaway 11y ago
      Agreed, but here is the list of specs: http://ircv3.net/irc/ http://ircv3.net/irc/
      - rspeer 11y ago
        I don't understand what on that page would let you read messages people sent while you're not connected, or let you participate in IRC over an unreliable connection such as a mobile network.
- okasaki 11y ago
  Why do people talk like this is some impossible feat for IRC? 1. Have a bot that's in the channel from the start 2. cd into the bot's log directory and type python -m SimpleHTTPServer 3. put the url into the channel topic How do some developers fail to rise up to this level of problem solving? I am amazed.
  - enraged_camel 11y ago
    I'm a developer. The problem is not that I'm "failing to rise up to this level of problem-solving". The problem is how much free time I have, and whether I can afford distractions from my main project to fiddle with IRC and get it to do what I want. We use Slack because "it just works". You get invited, you join, and BAM! You're done. There is one uniform client for all platforms and a bazillion integrations already developed for you. And creating your own is usually a simple matter of sending a POST request to a channel's webhook using a unique token. Essentially it comes down to this: IRC is a protocol that requires a fair amount of research and configuration to make it do exactly what you want it to do. Slack is a product that comes with the vast majority of features most teams need. That's why a ton of people are gravitating towards the latter.

tabbott 11y ago

It's worth mentioning that Zulip (https://zulip.org/ https://zulip.org/) is a new open source option that has basically all the features IRC/Slack does. So using open source tools for open source development doesn't have to mean dealing with IRC's limitations. (I'm one of the Zulip maintainers; happy to answer any questions about it).

brazzledazzle 11y ago
I've been meaning to give Zulip a try. How many users can it handle? Less importantly: What would you say its biggest missing feature is vs Slack? And conversely what does it bring to the table that Slack can't touch yet?
- cpitman 11y ago
  IMO, push notifications for mobile applications is a big hole. It's not an easy problem to solve, but as of right now I believe you have to release your own flavor of the mobile applications for this to work.
  - tabbott 11y ago
    Yeah, the mobile apps support that on zulip.com but work needs to be done to make that work with running your own Zulip server...
- ekimekim 11y ago
  I'll field the latter. I've used both Zulip and Slack in small team (5-20 people) settings and I much prefer Zulip. In particular I like how the zulip UI is single-stream by default. Messages from different channels are interleaved, so you can read all new messages at a glance, but still well separated by visual elements including color - I don't find it confusing. And I can focus down to any particular channel , or reply to that channel, in one click. It goes all-in on this "many streams, one view" model with the concept of topics - lightweight "subject headers" for individual sub-streams of a channel. This neatly avoids the "two conversations at once" problems that can occur in other systems occasionally. Some more minor points are a wider range of markup available than slack (including syntax highlighting for code), and better support for short-lived private groups (ie. "a PM between Alice, Bob and Charlie") As to what I think Slack does better: More one-click integrations (and likely other backend admin stuff that I don't see as a simple user). AFAIK Zulip doesn't have an irc gateway. Also when I last used it (over a year ago) Zulip's mobile client was quite poor. I'm sure others can come up with more differences - to be honest I tend to treat slack as "slightly smarter irc" so I don't pay attention to all the bells and whistles. Finally I should caveat that these same features I like are things people dislike about Zulip - it's more dissimilar to existing solutions and people will always have their preferred ways of doing things. I personally find Zulip amazing for me.

BoxFour 11y ago

Ehh, as someone your age (a couple years younger even), I have a completely different take on IRC. It's incredibly intuitive because it's so similar to all the other chat clients we grew up with (presumably because they're based on IRC). Sure, figuring out bouncers and build bots is a little tricky at first, but so what? That's the fun part. It's kinda fun digging into the IRC protocol and figuring out how it works. And ok, if that's not fun for you, there are plenty of really "click and install" tools for you (e.g. ZNC is super easy to setup). Not to sound like an elitist prick, but if you can't figure out how to setup an IRC bouncer, I'm not sure I really trust you contributing to the linux kernel, yaknow? Reducing friction is great: But the kind of friction we should be trying to reduce is bureaucratic friction. Throwing out PRs and yelling at people because they forgot to cc some particular maintainer - that's the kind of friction that sucks. Having to setup an IRC bouncer? Idk, I think that's fine.

detaro 11y ago
Same age group: Which chat systems were similar to IRC, but not to Slack, outside of IRC clients? And just because someone doesn't want to spend the time fiddling with IRC bouncers, IRC bots, getting clients to display things nicely doesn't mean that they are a bad developer. Just that they have different priorities for their time than you. I'm not saying that Slack is perfect or frictionless, but neither is IRC. And especially if you don't do it all the time, getting people set up to work with Slack is way easier than IRC. I really find these discussions half amusing and half depressing. 2 sides have something that is "good enough", both insist that nearly all you want can be solved with their solution, especially if you just do X1,X2,X3,Y1,Y5, and Z4 and you technically could build something that is perfect for both on top: but sadly (and understandably) no-one actually cares enough to do so. Because what they have is "good enough"(TM).
- BoxFour 11y ago
  > Which chat systems were similar to IRC, but not to Slack, outside of IRC clients? Slack is very similar to IRC at its core, so I'm not sure I see what you're asking here. I meant that IRC isn't foreign or alien to anyone who's familiar with chat clients - the basic concept of servers and channels and nicknames is pretty universal. > And just because someone doesn't want to spend the time fiddling with IRC bouncers, IRC bots, getting clients to display things nicely doesn't mean that they are a bad developer. I feel like I covered this point already: > And ok, if that's not fun for you, there are plenty of really "click and install" tools for you (e.g. ZNC is super easy to setup). > And especially if you don't do it all the time, getting people set up to work with Slack is way easier than IRC. What are you referring to here by "getting people setup"? Like a corporate environment? It's fairly easy to setup bouncers and the like in a corporate environment using tools like chef, etc. I really don't feel like this is a strong argument for a corporate setting. If you mean on a personal level for individual contributors to get up and running on contributing to FOSS, sure it's not 100% frictionless - but pretty much. Again, there are lots of bouncers that can be setup with <5 commands. If the argument is that it takes an extra ten minutes to install ZNC vs. Slack, then I dunno - I guess I don't see that as very much friction when the tradeoff is using non-free software. > I really find these discussions half amusing and half depressing I feel the same way, but for different reasons. It's a little depressing to me how averse people are to spending 10 extra minutes to use FOSS, usually under the guise of "I have different priorities." I thought developers in the wild would at least be slightly more willing to invest the time, especially post-Snowden, to use FOSS. I guess that was just a college pipe-dream of mine.

jerrac 11y ago

I actively avoided IRC for years. I still avoid it whenever possible. And I've been developing and sysadmining for the web for more than 10 years now. Frankly, it boils down to that I just don't like it. I'm more interested in getting better at programming, or learning about containers, or some other useful thing, than trying to figure out IRC's odd interface. Chat isn't something I should have to think about. It should just work. So, I agree with most of what @vonklaus said, and disagree with the links pro-irc stance. I've never used Slack, so I have no opinion on it.

lectrick 11y ago
You can master IRC with a few basic commands. In fact I rarely have to use anything more than /join, /leave and /msg <someone>. /me <some text> for announcing an action. That's about it. (It probably helps that a lot of in-game chat interfaces use a lot of these same commands, as I'm a gamer as well as a programmer.) There's a pretty nice web interface to IRC called irccloud.com which also persists your connection (so you can simply log onto irccloud.com somewhere else, and entire history is preserved).

MichaelGG 11y ago

Given how terrible the HipChat client is on Windows, it's really saying a lot that people end up choosing that over IRC. Maybe Freenode could implement an enhanced IRC protocol and clients could opt-in to that. I know at least one project that was very active on IRC, and they moved to HipChat for convenience. They also went full-on with the entire Atlassian stack (again, the fact anyone would choose JIRA is damning against everything else.)