KTp/RepeatedDiscussions/IRC

Why don't you support IRC

We used to, and on a technical level we do support it.

IRC and IM have very different usages, so whilst we are a good IM client that I like using, none of the developers used it for IRC.

For good IRC support we need NickServ we need the IRC ommands like "/join" we need to be able to lurk in many many channels and so on, everything is a little bit different. KDE already has two fantastic IRC applications; Konversation and Quassel. KDE on the whole gains nothing if we try and be in competition with Konversation.

We were getting bug reports/wishlists on IRC requests, and we took a decision that rather than giving users a bad IRC experience, it would be better to simply not support it. This allows us to focus on the IM parts that aren't being covered elsewhere.

When will you reconsider this decision

We will rediscuss it at the next Akademy.

We support jabber chat rooms which have an overlap of usages, so our IRC support is steadily increasing anyway.

Can I enable it anyway?

If you want to help hack on IRC support, sure. If you look in accounts-kcm code, it is pretty obvious how to re-enable it. We will help merge patches, but not accept bug requests.

Or it can be added manually, by running the following command

mc-tool add idle/irc Freenode string:account=$USER-ktp string:server=irc.freenode.net

It will now appear in your Accounts for you to edit