IRC (was: GNU Mach panic)

[Thomas Schwinge]

[ Replied publically with Alfred's permission. ]

On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 09:35:17AM +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> If you are familiar with IRC then you can pop by irc.gnu.org, ##hurd.

I've never used IRC before, but installed the Emacs IRC Client ERC
<URL:http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsIRCClient>.

One disadvantage I see in using IRC (apart from the higher telephone
bill I'll be getting -- I'm using dial-up access) is that good things
will be discussed, new methods will be developed, problems will be
solved, etc. and a lot of the evolved results will be forgotten after a
few weeks or will have to be repeated again and again -- at least I was
not able to quickly find an archive of logged IRC sessions using google,
which I'm used to consult when having a question.
Was I just too stupid to find such archives or do they really not exist?

I suppose it would be rather trivial to have interesting channels logged
on a few machines, have the logs compared and merged, so that nothing is
missed and have the whole story published somewhere.
Is someone doing or able to do that?


On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 12:21:34AM +0100, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>    Alfred, is it ok for you if I _publically_ answer to your two
>    private messages?  (Attached.)
> 
> I have no problems with that, other then flooding the mailing list
> with mails back and forth

All the other open source projects I've contributed to, succesfully use
mailing lists as their primary (and often only) communication-technique.

> when one could solve the problem and then
> post one message describing the solution.

Is that regularely done?
I've just digged through my archives of the Hurd's mailing lists and
found some snippets about "[...] was discussed on IRC", but only very
few ones that were explicit about that discussions's results.


If your (the Hurd developers's) working-style is using IRC then I'll try
to get used to that.
:-)


Regards,
 Thomas


P.S. On a tangent: it would be really nice if downloadable archives of
the Hurd-related mailing lists were available on
<URL:http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/>,
<URL:http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-hurd/>,
<URL:http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/web-hurd/>,
<URL:http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/l4-hurd/>,
<URL:http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/commit-hurd/>,
<URL:http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/hurd-devel/> and
<URL:http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-system-discuss/>.
For the latter they are advertised to be available, but they are not.
I reported that to <URL:mailto:webmasters@gnu.org> on 2004-08-09, got my
request acknowledged, again asked about it at the end of October, got no
answer and nothing has happened since then.  I've re-report that issue
right now.
Again, being on dial-up it's no fun digging through web archives.
:-|
Maybe someone with greater authority then me could have a look at that?
:-)