Consider changing the name of the #bitlbee channel

[wilmer]

From time to time when people join the #bitlbee channel on OFTC, their auto-identify script kicks in. Not really convenient for them and their password security, so maybe it would be a good thing to rename the BEE #bitlbee channel.

&bitlbee could be a suitable name.

But let's see how many scripts and other things need to know about this, don't want to break too much.

[timing]

Please keep it #bitlbee, unless every account will have his own channel. (like #msn001, #yahoo001) But then again, you still need a channel for settings and such.

[wilmer]

If the channel gets a different name, most likely it'll be &bitlbee, so the change isn't dramatic. Just hopefully enough to get rid of scripts that accidentally wake up when someone joins the OFTC #bitlbee. (And it'll allow me to talk about #bitlbee/&bitlbee without having to mention a network name all the time ;-))

Also, the & is more logical since it means the channel is specific to the server you're on. Although actually it's even specific to your *connection*, but well...

[wilmer]

[24]

Let's see how people will react, and how many people don't know channel names don't have to start with #. ;-)

[wilmer]

Don't forget to update the documentation! There are probably still many places refering to the old channel name, which isn't a very nice thing for a 1.0 release.

[wilmer]

I can close it again.

[wilmer]

Errr, [40].

[toxik]

(I just love how you talk to yourself all the time)

I'd suggest you have some kind of warning when the bitlbee server gets a message destined to #bitlbee, telling the client that one or more scripts are deprecated (but still, act as if destined to &bitlbee for back. compat.)

[wilmer]

And I love how you talk to closed bugs. :-P

And well, people will notice soon enough that the channel name changed, and that some of their scripts don't work anymore, so I don't think there's a need to hardcode this into the code. Timing actually updates most of his scripts already, I guess he'll finish it before 1.0 comes out (whenever that might be exactly).

[Jelmer Vernooij]

Once we release 1.0, I think it is fair to make sure there are always clear and smooth upgrade paths even for small things. Before that, I think minor changes like this should be allowed. Staying backwards compatible with all the code we released in the past is too tricky.

Just my $0.02.

[toxik]

It's not closed... you just think it is!

Euh anyway, if there's a smaller script somewhere in a dark basement, it won't stand a chance to update itself! (One might think that it shouldn't care for channel-name tho, most of timing's script doesn't, it just keeps track of topic - in other words, keep the channel topic.)

[wilmer]

Having the channel name hardcoded into the script is a bad idea anyway, IMHO. (Although the way detection works right now (from the channel name) is probably not that smart either.) There already are some public servers with a different name for the control channel (and kind of related, some package maintainers rename root in their bitlbee packages, which I, BTW, am not too happy about).

But Jelmer is right. Just that I think this specific thing is not a big issue.

But hardcoding the old channel name into the source for any reason seems like a Bad Thing [tm] to me. Hardcoding might be an easy way to do things, but I try to avoid it as much as possible.