Re: IRC perhaps?

[Garance A Drosihn <drosih@xxxxxxx>]

At 11:22 AM -0500 7/18/03, dave wrote:
> Its faster... but not documented or logged and really really
> hard to participate if you have a job and can't be on IRC all day.
>
> #opendarwin has a major problem with this I might add because
> nothing happens on the mailing lists and its all happening on
> IRC... people who even have different sleeping habits cannot
> participate.

  <aside>
Here at RPI we've used a MOO-based chat system that we call
'lily'.  It is similar to IRC in some ways, but it does keep
an in-memory copy of what is said in each discussion (what
IRC would call a channel).  It has a '/review' command, so
you can connect and say:  /review dragonfly last 18h
to see what everyone has said in the past 18 hours (note that
there's a number of other review options, not just "hours").
So, we can and do carry on discussions where the people involved
are living on very different schedules.

we have clients for lily that are available for a number of
different platforms.

> I strongly recommend keeping it out of IRC for now.

Note that I avoid IRC, and I certainly would be disappointed
if any major development activity was in IRC.  So, I completely
understand if people felt the same way wrt lily, and wanted to
stick with the known quantity of mailing lists.

On the other hand, we *do* have this lily service that we *do*
like better than IRC, and I would just kick myself if I didn't
at least suggest setting one up for dragonfly...   :-)
  </aside>

I'd also note that I'm not entirely convinced that a chat system
is the best medium for serious-thought development.  It's great
for *chatting*, such as "Hey, which include library has XXX?",
but it works best for lots of short messages.  It does not work
as well for exchanging long technical comparisons of a variety
of development options.

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@xxxxxxxxxxx
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@xxxxxxx