ZNC Port

[Ian Denhardt]

Hey All,

So I finally got tired of trying to write a robust implementation of the
IRC protocol as found, and decided to port an existing IRC bouncer. IRC
Idler is officially dead, and I've just packaged up an spk for a port of
ZNC[1]. If you tried out IRC Idler, it will look pretty similar from the
outside -- similar web ui, same funky websocket thing for connecting.
The main difference is that the protocol support is *much* better, and
it is generally less buggy.

The UI could use quite a bit of polish. There are some other rough edges
as well; be sure to read the doc linked below.

Links:

The spk:

https://mirror.zenhack.net/pub/sandstorm-znc/znc-alpha-1.spk

The source code:

https://github.com/zenhack/sandstorm-znc

Instructions for use, and caveats:

https://github.com/zenhack/sandstorm-znc#using

Binaries for websocket-proxy, for various platforms:

https://mirror.zenhack.net/pub/websocket-proxy/

The above includes signed sha256 hashes of each of the binaries, if you
want to verify them. You can also easily build from source once you have
a Go compiler on your system.

Source for websocket proxy:

https://github.com/zenhack/websocket-proxy

The upstream ZNC wiki:

http://wiki.znc.in

My issue tracker:

https://github.com/zenhack/sandstorm-znc/issues

(Please report issues!)

I hope to make this more polished going forward, but decided to release
early. It's certainly more robust than IRC Idler ever was. I've been
dogfooding it for the past couple days, and it's been pretty usable.

In addtion to watching this mailing list, I'm generally responsive on
Github and I hang out in #sandstorm on Freenode (connected via this
app!).

Let me know what y'all think.

[1]: http://znc.in

[Ian Denhardt]

Alpha 2 is out:

https://mirror.zenhack.net/pub/sandstorm-znc/znc-alpha-2.spk

The user-visible changes:

* Server settings and the ipNetwork capability are are now saved. With
Alpha 1, if the grain was shut down, on restart you'd have to set the
hostname/port again, and re-grant network access.

Note that if you've got a running grain, you will hit this problem
when upgrading, since that restarts the grain, but it should be OK
afterwards.
* The user has admin access to znc itself. Among other things, this
allows persisting ZNC's config to disk, which let's you do important
things like permanently change your nick.

I've been dogfooding this for a while and it's been working well --
publishing the spk has been on my TODO list for longer than I intended.

I'd like to explicitly solicit feedback. It's at a point where while I'm
aware it's not the most polished thing out there, but it's good enough
to mostly not bug me, so I want to hear what other people think is
important.

I know some folks can't actually run this because of the ipNetwork
requirement; I'd like to get a sense of how many of you there are, so a
brief hello would be appreciated.

Cheers,

-Ian

Quoting Ian Denhardt (2017-03-20 17:31:08)