[gentoo-dev] Proposal: New irc data field in layman's repositories.xml file format

[Brian Dolbec]

As times have changed and IRC is used more an more.  I propose adding an
optional <irc></irc> data field to layman's repositories.xml file
format.  This information would be listed along with the other
information when running:

# layman -i some-overlay

This added information would then be available and listed in
>=layman-2.0* for any overlays that choose to add that information to
their listing. Yes, that functionality is present in layman-2.0.0_rc3
which is currently in the tree.  For layman 1.* versions this additional
information would simply be ignored and not printed since there is no
code to detect and print it.  So there would be no backwards compatible
problems caused by running the older layman versions.  I also do not
intend to add that functionality to the 1.* versions as the 2.0.0_rc3
release is quite stable and I am near to releasing a 2.0.0 final.


The irc field would be a simple string that can contain irc:// urls or
plain text channel listings.  Same as the homepage field.

eg:

    <irc>Channel #gentoo-guis on the freenode network</irc>
or
    <irc>#gentoo-guis on the freenode IRC network, irc://irc.gentoo.org/gentoo-guis</irc>


For those that might not like the repositories.xml file grow slightly
larger with the additional data (if added).  The layman-2.0 api has made
changes to reduce the bandwidth usage on the gentoo servers.  I will
create a more detailed blog post about those results later.  But for
those wanting to see the data that Alec Warner <antarus> graciously
compiled from the infrastructure logs.  See bug 398465 [1].  The
layman-2.0 api will reduce overall bandwidth far more than the
additional irc data will add to it.


[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=398465
-- 
Brian Dolbec <dolsen@g.o>