[Hamara-devel] documenting IRC - using google trends to know which are good.

[shirish]

Hi all,
While google trends is next to useless to us as most client-facing foss 
tools don't have good reach.

I used several clients for comparisons, the list from 
https://wiki.debian.org/IrcClients was per-used with one addition Polari 
which has come in only last year to Debian as it has matured over time.

I have been thinking of trying it out but haven't had time, so this is 
perfect opportunity to test it as well :)

 From the changelog

polari (3.16.1-2) unstable; urgency=medium

   * Bump dependency on gjs to (>= 1.43.3) for GTK widget templates support.
     (Closes: #789372)

  -- Michael Biebl <biebl at debian.org>  Tue, 23 Jun 2015 02:00:58 +0200

...........................................

polari (3.12.1-1) unstable; urgency=low

   [ Brandon Snider ]
   * New upstream release.

   [ Laurent Bigonville ]
   * New upstream release (3.12.1)
   * debian/control:
     - Add Vcs-* fields
     - Add missing {build-,}dependencies
     - Bump Standards-Version to 3.9.5 (no further changes)
   * debian/rules:
     - Drop get-fresh-source targets, do not reinvent the wheel
     - Include uploaders.mk file to generate uploaders list
   * debian/copyright: Add licence text

  -- Laurent Bigonville <bigon at debian.org>  Sat, 26 Apr 2014 16:23:10 +0200

The fight was between Empathy, Irssi, pidgin, Smuxi, Weechat, Xchat, 
Polari and of these Pidgin is the most known but it uses GTK.

Dunno whether we want to go all bare on the ARM box and do we want the 
most features. Maybe somebody could run all of them in an ARM box and do 
a totally non-scientific test as to which of these would be more or less 
ok although the text clients should have lower CPU cycles .

As aparna asked for advice, did look through a few of them and found 
smuxi having an interesting feature

https://smuxi.im/documentation/message-patterns/

If that fits, that would be a wonderful addition/feature for hamara 
users (at least college-level students would love that.)

At least that's my take. There are about 50 odd IRC clients, servers, 
middleware and what not which are all there in Debian.

I am taking time, trying some of those out and seeing which have GUI so 
that we could see on those only. There are a bunch of text-based ones 
probably one of them would suffice for emergency use (read only on 
console and need to troubleshoot something and have access to net 
connection :) )

This will take its own time but doing it.

-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org