Activities/IRC

The IRC activity allows you to chat with other Sugar/OLPC users and enthusiasts on the Internet via Internet Relay Chat (IRC).

The activity defaults to a "channel" (akin to a "room") called #sugar on the Freenode network, but you can join one of the many channels available by typing /join #channel, where #channel is the channel name. Like many Free/Open Source projects, Sugar developers frequent this channel, and are happy to help with any Sugar questions and suggestions you may have.

See the Internet Relay Chat page on this wiki for a list of Sugar-related channels you can join.

IRC Commands

The following commands can be typed into the input box, all preceded by a slash (/):

• /join #channel - join a channel
• /server irc.example.org - connect to a different network
• /query user - open up a private chat window with another user
• /msg user message - privately message another user without opening a new window
• /nick new_name - change your nickname away from the default

Many other commands are available, and you can create and administer your own channels as well: see the IRC FAQ for more information.

Development

The activity was originally developed under the name XoIRC in 2007 by Eduardo Silva. It was migrated to Sugar Labs Git/Trac in 2009 and maintained until 2010 by Mel Chua. Aneesh Dogra and Fran Rogers are the current maintainers.

Internally, the activity is built around an all-Python IRC client, Urk (no longer maintained since 2007). The license is GPL2+.

Resources

• Activity Library page, with downloads
• Sources
• Trac Tickets: Sugar Labs OLPC

Wishlist

1. Port to a new and more regularly updated python-irc library.
2. Multithreading: The IRC Activity is very slow when compared to other IRC clients.
3. Alert on highlight
4. Whois info
5. Backlog
6. Multiple connections (presently you can only connect to one server, so if I want to connect to 2 channels say one on mibbit and one on freenode. I can't do that in IRC.)
7. Theming (would like to add, but again its secondary)
8. Encoding options. Not everyone speaks english on IRC, try going to a chinese channel using the IRC activity and see what happens. Does it shows the chinese characters properly? I haven't tested this myself, but I reckon it won't work.
9. Save chat history in journal. (Very very important)
10. Allowing someone to track keywords and get notifications would be nice, so I could track "Turtle Art" and be notified whenever the conversation turned to that topic.
11. When ordinary IRC users use screen with console client, It would be great to have awaylog that displays our highlights even when we are not present.This feature could be turn on only for registered nicks and some webservice + irclogs will be involved. For example: when user joins channel, IRC Activity could show all highlights since user's last visit, of course with reasonable time/messages limit.