The future of irc.mozilla.org/#servo

[Josh Bowman-Matthews]

Hi folks! Mozilla has announced [1] that irc.mozilla.org is being
officially replaced by an instance of Riot/Matrix, so we now need to
make a decision about what happens next. The server will shut down in
March 2020, and I see two possible outcomes for our official day-to-day
synchronous project discussions:
1) a #servo channel on the Mozilla Matrix instance
2) a #servo channel on irc.freenode.org

Beyond the question of personal comfort with chat clients, I can think
of the following considerations:

* logging - we currently rely on http://logs.glob.uno/ for persistent
channel logging, run by a Mozilla employee.

* bots
* crowbot is an IRC bot whose biggest responsibilities include github
link integration, collecting standups entries, and recording messages
for users who aren't online.
* bitbot is an IRC bot responsible for reporting github updates to
repositories under the servo organization

Please be aware that there exists an IRC gateway for Matrix which
ajeffrey has successfully used, so if you really like your IRC client
that isn't _necessarily_ a complete blocker.

Am I forgetting anything? I'm on the fence about the choice right now,
and I would like to hear from people who semi-regularly contribute to
discussions (or have a particular interest in lurking) if they have a
preference.

Cheers,
Josh

[1]
https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/synchronous-messaging-at-mozilla-the-decision/50620/2

[Lars Bergstrom]

Has anybody got experience with the Discord<->Matrix bridge (
https://matrix.org/bridges/#discord )?

Like the rest of Mozilla, I don't particularly enjoy Discord's terms of
service / privacy policy, but I'm part of a zillion Discord servers for
other communities. Whereas #servo IRC is my last remaining (active) IRC
channel.
- Lars

On Thu, Dec 19, 2019 at 10:43 AM Josh Bowman-Matthews <jo...@joshmatthews.net>
wrote:

> _______________________________________________
> dev-servo mailing list
> dev-...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-servo
>

[Simon Sapin]

I’ve been mostly happy with IRC, but for #servo I think I’d like to try out Matrix
since many Mozillians will need it anyway.

https://view.matrix.org/ can presumably fulfill public logging (and might be
maintained by more than one person).

Porting bots to a different protocol would take some work but seems doable.

--
Simon Sapin

[Alan Jeffrey]

I've been using the IRC <-> Matrix bridge and the matrix client, and I've
been quite happy with them. I'd be in favour of moving to matrix, it seems
pretty decent, the ToS / CPG will be easier, and there's a certain weight
in numbers. The main effort would be updating the bots, but with a bit of
luck there may be off-the-shelf solutions, we won't be the only
github-based software project wanting a matrix bot!

A.

[Manish Goregaokar]

My main concern is that I would rather not have to run Yet Another electron
app, especially given the terrible battery life my laptop has on Linux.

It seems like I should be able to bridge with irssi, or perhaps try out a
web based client, so I'm fine with switching, but i'm also okay with
staying.

-Manish Goregaokar

[Kent Sandvik]

Use Riot / Matrix to keep things consistent. --Kent

On Thu, Dec 19, 2019 at 10:33 AM Manish Goregaokar <manis...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Josh Bowman-Matthews]

One more IRC integration that I forgot about - we receive notifications
about daily taskcluster job failures on IRC. We'll want to verify the
plans for the taskcluster-notify service with respect to Matrix.

[Simon Sapin]

On 20/12/2019 17:41, Josh Bowman-Matthews wrote:
> One more IRC integration that I forgot about - we receive notifications
> about daily taskcluster job failures on IRC. We'll want to verify the
> plans for the taskcluster-notify service with respect to Matrix.

I asked:

> <SimonSapin> Hi. What’s the future of IRC notifications through
> https://docs.taskcluster.net/docs/reference/core/notify/usage ? Will they move to
> Matrix? > <tomprince> I believe they should, yeah. I know it has been talked about before
> matrix was announced. It will need to be implemented first, though, and I'm not
> sure what the taskcluster team's bandwidth for that is.
> <bstack> it's on our radar. probably can get it done in q1?
> <bstack> assuming that their api isn't too hard to work with
> <bstack> also could be a great contributor project actually
> <SimonSapin>
> https://github.com/taskcluster/taskcluster/tree/master/services/notify looks like
> it’s in JS, and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk exists
> <bstack> yeah, the plan is to use that
> <bstack> but it could still take a little while to get it all working

[J. Ryan Stinnett]

On Sun, 22 Dec 2019 at 08:05, Simon Sapin <simon...@exyr.org> wrote:
> > <bstack> assuming that their api isn't too hard to work with
> > <bstack> also could be a great contributor project actually
> > <SimonSapin>
> > https://github.com/taskcluster/taskcluster/tree/master/services/notify looks like
> > it’s in JS, and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-js-sdk exists

For a bot, I'd recommend
https://github.com/turt2live/matrix-js-bot-sdk (maintained by Matrix
core team member) which is simpler and should be easier to use for a
bot than the full JS SDK. There's also a guide available for this bot
SDK: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/usage-of-matrix-js-bot-sdk/.

- Ryan

[Josh Matthews]

Following up here - given the responses on this list, I am inclined to
transition to the new Matrix network when it's available. That should be
before the end of the month, at which point we can start working on the
missing tooling.

Cheers,
Josh

[Josh Matthews]

Following up again: the official announcement hasn't been made yet, but
we have the Servo room on the Mozilla Matrix instance
(https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#servo:mozilla.org) and more and more
discussion is centralizing there. Please use the Matrix room in place of
IRC for any discussions going forward!

Cheers,
Josh

[Simon Sapin]

On 19/12/2019 17:43, Josh Bowman-Matthews wrote:
> * crowbot is an IRC bot whose biggest responsibilities include github
> link integration, collecting standups entries, and recording messages
> for users who aren't online.

Riot (the main Matrix client) provides "URL previews" by default, which for GitHub
PRs includes the title and start of the description.

Matrix already records messages while no client is running, clients show and
highlight the next time they run mentions that happen during that time.

So it looks like what remains is mostly standups? Benjamin said he’d be open to
accepting PRs to https://github.com/bnjbvr/botzilla

--
Simon Sapin

[Josh Matthews]

We now have support for standups; I'm running
https://github.com/servo/botzilla on heroku under the `crowbot` user.
The taskcluster folks are actively working on matrix notifications for
taskcluster jobs, too. Looks like we're in good shape for the upcoming
IRC decommissioning!