jdev - 2021-03-16

not sure if you can do it in a genric way, since every gatewayed network has different characteristics. but for e.g. IRC transports, a standardized JID format would maybe help?

then you could ask the user for the 4-tuple of transport address, IRC channel, IRC server and IRC nick

flow: IRC server is typically one of a set of hostnames for a given network, so abstracting that away would be worthwhile.

IMO, an IRC gateway operator should then operate explicit proxies for well-known networks, like euirc.yax.im - in that case, the localpart of the JID is a user or a channel, so the problem is vastly reduced

maybe, i would potentially consider that the irc transports is aware of the irc network the IRC server belongs to, tries to connect to the user specified irc server, and optionally falls back to another server from the irc networks pool

Choosing the right server for a given network is an art

OTOH, you'd want all different servers from a given network to be reachable under the same JID, because ge0rg@de.freenode.net is the same identity as ge0rg@irc.freenode.net and you don't want to have two different chat histories

fair point

I have no idea if there is some generic network identifier provided by the IRC server on connect.

probably not, at least not in IRCv3

but even then, you'd end up with a JID mismatch when connecting

I'm helping myself by configuring a set of servers on a given network alias via ad-hoc

but that's really advanced usage

and then you have the fun things like a certain irc server offering non-ssl service on the default ircs port, leading to a certain widely used implementation to busy-loop ssl-connecting to that non-ssl port.

Speaking of TLS, certificate validation is also terrible on IRC because no client ever validates that, so admins usually have multiple domains aliasing to each other, but only one domain in the certificate, which itself is often expired.

It’s in a really sad situation.

lovetox, how do pure IRC clients handle this? ✏

They have a "well known name" (for example "freenode") for the network and a list of corresponding servers pre-configured

Not sure how they handle a link like irc:#haiku@chat.freenode.net if you are connected to irc.freenode.org but it in fact points to the same place

I wouldn't pe surprised if they create a second connection to the same network

If only there existed some kind of DNS method of pointing at multiple servers for a particular domain.

They also do this

chat.freenode.net will pick a server for you. But sometimes it will pick one that isn't online or is super busy and will take a few minutes to allow your connection

So it's not uncommon to use a specific "good" server

(ok for Freenode it isn't that bad, but for example for ircnet it's common for me to have problems connecting using the main dns)

(yep, ircnet is strange)