Re: Matrix IRC bridge considered harmful

[Alexandre Franke <afranke gnome org>]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 7:31 PM Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org> wrote:
> Hi,

Hi,

> I just got an email from a new-ish contributor: "I sent you some PMs
> about a week ago but I think you weren't online when I sent them so I'm
> assuming you didn't receive anything." Problem is the Matrix IRC bridge
> presents all IRC users as online, even when they're not.

Not immediately relevant to the issue but would help me as I’m a bit
confused: weren’t *you* on Matrix rather than IRC?

> If an IRC user
> is offline, it lets you send private messages, but they get *silently
> dropped*. From Matrix, it appears as if the message was successfully
> delivered, but it was never actually sent to IRC.

I’m pretty sure one gets at least a notification in the GIMPNet IRC
Bridge status conversation that goes along the lines of:

Received an error on irc.gimp.org: err_nosuchnick
["AlexandreFranke","someircnick","No such nick/channel"]

At least I did a couple weeks ago when I tried to send a message to an
IRC user. I would then agree that it is far from ideal, but it would
also clearly not as dramatic as you paint it.

> Personally, I think native Matrix would be a *lot* nicer than IRC, if
> we have sysadmin time to get it set up, but I'm not going to be picky
> here. I'd just like us to be able to trust that we're not missing
> important messages.

The Matrix folks offered to host our instance on
[Modular](https://modular.im/) just like they already do for KDE and
now Mozilla too[1], so sysadmin time is not a problem, is it?

[1] they just switched, details at
https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/synchronous-messaging-at-mozilla-the-decision/50620

-- 
Alexandre Franke
GNOME Hacker