Re: [gentoo-project] Council meeting 2021-07-11 - call for agenda items

[Rich Freeman]

On Wed, Jul 7, 2021 at 2:55 AM Sam Jorna (wraeth) <wraeth@g.o> wrote:
>
> On 7/7/21 11:59 am, Rich Freeman wrote:
> > I'd like the council to vote on one of the following, or some other
> > approach, preferably to get IRC/email/usernames to match once more:
>
> > * On 2021-08-01 the LDAP user database will be queried to compare
> > their IRC nickname to uid/email addresses.  If these do not match,
> > then the retirement process for that developer will commence.  Users
> > who are unable to obtain a matching nick should contact <foo> to have
> > this addressed with Libera/Infra prior to this date.
>
> Would this be an ongoing thing?  This also ties into my previous point -
> if I temporarily switch nicks, would I be in violation?  What if my
> connection drops/reconnects and I end up as 'wraeth_' and don't notice,
> would I be in violation and risk retirement (an extreme example, but
> hopefully you get my point)?

See above.  Nick collisions/etc have always been a thing and I don't
think having an underscore at the end really creates confusion,
especially with autocomplete and most IRC clients recognizing your
nominal nick in highlights.  The issue is that we have a fair number
of devs (including ones who were among the first to change networks)
who chose completely different nicks.

> Each of the above three options also mean available Gentoo uids is
> dependent on whether a given nick is available on Libera.

That was always the case with Freenode.  It isn't an accident that
they matched before.  New devs would be assigned a uid that matched
their nick.   So, the namespace was already constrained.

> Perhaps, rather than forcing either nicks or uids to change, this last
> option should be properly codified and enforced?  Should there also be
> some guideline on how long someone can use a nick before it's considered
> "their nick"?  Alternatively, can LDAP support multiple nick entries?

IMO this is a pretty bad option.  It basically means that the only way
to go ping somebody on IRC is to first do a table scan to figure out
what they're called at that particular moment.

The next obvious step is adding bot commands to facilitate this, so
now we have more bot spam in our channels as people are constantly
asking bots whether somebody is already in the channel (since the
channel member list is now useless), or to relay messages which means
everybody gets to read the channel twice.  Or people are first posting
"foo, are you here?" hoping to catch them with highlighting rules.
Then they say "willikins: is foo here?"

The whole point of having things like IRC channels is to facilitate
communication.  Having a level of indirection obfuscates
communication.  In more rich applications like github/bugzilla/etc
there are often search functions for things like authors which help
alleviate this.  Your typical IRC client doesn't have LDAP integration
so that we can dynamically map nicknames that change according to
mood.

If we were using something like Matrix then we could have a Federated
Gentoo identity that is linked to LDAP and so there is never a
discrepancy.  I agree that there is an argument for the simplicity of
IRC.  However, having a level of indirection in nicknames goes against
that argument for simplicity.  If you want a fancy communications
system that relies on LDAP lookups then at least automate this vs just
having everybody constantly scanning a webpage.

> I think at least the issues of multiple/temporary nicks could be
> mitigated if you replace 'nick' with 'account' - their Libera account
> name must match their Gentoo uid in order to be eligible for a cloak.
> That way the cloak matches their Gentoo uid (since the format is
> gentoo/developer/$account) making them easier to identify, and you can
> look up a nick in nickserv to see which account owns it (though you
> can't look up an account and see what nicks it owns, nor if they are
> currently online).

As you point out, this lets you use whois to figure out who some
random nick on Freenode is.  It doesn't let you figure out what nick
to use to ping somebody about something when it happens to be May the
4th, June the 7th, August the 13th, or whatever other days of the year
various random individuals decide to celebrate various random
holidays.  When you have hundreds of people in an org you can't just
expect to know that this guy celebrates Ewok day and goes by Wicket
when the death star is in the waning crescent phase.

> More generally, how would this apply to people who don't use IRC and
> thus would never have their IRC nick in LDAP match their uid?

The same way we handle people who don't answer the question in their
dev application about what their IRC nick is: presumably we don't give
them dev accounts already.

It isn't just hundreds of cases of coincidence that everybody used to
have matching Freenode nicks/Gentoo uids.  This was very much designed
into the process before.

I realize this whole situation seems a bit silly, but the whole point
of sticking with IRC was to keep things simple, and people changing
their nicks is actually hindering communications.  Some examples:

1. I had a conversation with a random person who ended up being a
Council member, where I wasted everybody's time adding context that I
didn't realize was unnecessary.
2. I've seen devs say on IRC that they need to go talk to somebody
when they were already on the channel (just under an obfuscated name),
resulting in delay/etc.
3. Most recently I was reading an IRC chat log posted in a separate
thread where it wasn't apparent until the second reading that somebody
else in the discussion was being quoted.  I ended up using /whois just
to confirm this.  Of course, if I were to do this using the list
archives six months from now who knows what /whois would say.

Yes, these are all relatively minor issues, but again, the whole point
of IRC is communication, and designing our system to practically
guarantee a future of minor communication problems seems suboptimal.

-- 
Rich