[jdev] MUC through IRC

[Norman Rasmussen]

On 10/25/06, Andreas Monitzer <jdev at monitzer.com> wrote:
> This is something I've always thought about. Using an IRC gateway for
> interconnecting between IRC and XMPP (which is the common way to do
> it right now) is pretty lame, since you need one connection per user
> on the XMPP side, which doesn't scale at all.

unless you connect the gateway as a component, then you only use a
single connection for all users.

> IRC supports server clusters, for example, freenode consists of 18
> servers (plus/minus a few), which are all interconnected, and you
> don't notice what server you're using (unless it crashes of course).
> What if you would just write an IRC server that connects to this
> cluster, and instead of offering IRC to the user, offers an MUC
> service? You would only need a single connection to the IRC servers,
> and the XMPP protocol users wouldn't be second class.
> Your server is the first step into this direction, which is great!

unfortunately I think that most clusters perfer that you use the same
ircd for each node, and each ircd has it's own protocol :-(

There are really 3 or 4 gateways around at the moment, each attacking
the problem from a different angle: (ignoring installation
requirements)

 - PyIRCt: requires XMPP client & account, user chooses irc servers and channels
 - JJIGW: requires XMPP client & account, admin chooses irc servers
(and channels?)
 - bitlbee: requires irc client & XMPP account, user chooses muc
servers/components
 - ejabberd-ircd: requires irc client, admin chooses muc server/component

-- 
- Norman Rasmussen
 - Email: norman at rasmussen.co.za
 - Home page: http://norman.rasmussen.co.za/