Greetings, On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 12:49 AM, James Hess <mysidia@gmail.com> wrote:
I wonder about the scalability of /LIST on todays IRC networks which have 5000+ channels at a time, it's so unreasonably large that it is pretty impractical for a human to find anything in /list, unless they apply some kind of filtering, after they just consumed heavy resources just to download the full listing.
There are actually functions within the LIST command to do that filtering at the server, as you mention later on....
Or with some sort of category-based listing system. Where /LIST contents are approved by humans, so they meet some sort of basic standard.
We did discuss this one in depth a few years ago. I think we may have actually coded part of it up as well, but there were a lot of political issues with rolling it out. At that point, the ethical questions came into play as to what would qualify for the list, and how it would be administered. The conversation just died out, as I recall, but its definitely worth considering reopening. If someone were to write up a patch implementing it, I would definitely consider merging it. There would have to be some discussions within the dalnet administration about actually using it, obviously, as well as the services support to do it as well.
So I would think it better to take away the inferior tool entirely and provide a robust complete and superior replacement mechanism for accomplishing the goal of finding a channel.
Agreed. If you write it, I'll review it. :) -epi