[Gsoc] IRC Activity fixes

[Aneesh Dogra]

Hello Michal,

Great that you have decided to do a GSOC project for us. Thanks!
Please refer to my inline comments below.

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 5:03 AM, Michał Poczwardowski <dmp0x7c5 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
> I'm a regular IRC user and have few new ideas regarding IRC Activity.
> As sugar channels reside at freenode, It would be nice to have
> NickServ support build-in. Also, when ordinary IRC users use screen
> with console client, It would be great to have awaylog that displays
> our hilights 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 hilights since user's last visit, of course with reasonable
> time/messages limit.
>

This is a really nice idea. Definitely worth implementing. But I would deem
it as secondary, if time permits we could probably work on this. The most
important features to work on will be:

1) Multithreading: The IRC Activity very slow when compared to other IRC
clients.
2) Alert on highlight
3) Whois info
4) Backlog
5) 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.)
6) Theming (would like to add, but again its secondary)
7) 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.
8) Save chat history in journal. (Very very important)

I would encourage you to open up your favorite IRC client and check what
features it provides, and would it be useful if we add it in the IRC
Activity?

I've found library[2] that could be used to replace deprecated Urk.
> Also implementing notifications and improving performance will be my
> priority.


The library you suggested, although better than urk, hasn't been updated
since 2012-09-29. Which makes me skeptical if this is the best alternate
available? Libraries tend to later act as bottlenecks. For eg: Urk
makes multithreading very difficult because it itself is single threaded.
That's why I want you select the best all-python irc library out there.

I will be grateful if you could give me some feedback to ideas provided.
>
> Thanks,
> Michal
>
> [1] http://dmpgsoc.azalayah.net/
> [2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/python-irclib/files/
>
> dmp at freenode
>
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