Subject: Re: bug#1892: Please ship http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErcBar included with ERC

From: "Antoine Levitt" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 18:06:10 +0100

Hi jason,
First of all, the version on emacswiki wasn't the latest. I just updated it
to the version I'm using.
I don't really care about copyright assignment, I'm willing to license it
with whatever you want. I just did that piece of code for my usage and
thought others might find it useful. I would of course love a piece of my
code to be included in Emacs. However, I don't think it should be included
in emacs, because its quality is not very good. Here are a few shortcomings
I noted :

- It uses a very crude heuristic to move back. Previously it was even
cruder, now it is (re-search-backward "^.*<.*>" nil t n), which means it
will screw up on /me and such, but will work on multi-line messages (eg if
you use wrapping). However, it might also not work on multilines messages
with <> in them. Maybe there are some erc internal functions I didn't see to
do that.

- The bar is placed as an overlay on text (underline or overline, currently
underline), which means it won't do well for instance in this case (admire
the superb ASCII artwork, to be viewed in monospace of course) :
<smeuuh> bla
------------
<smeuuh> blablablablablablablablablablabla
The ideal would be to put it full width, but I haven't found how to do that.

- There are some weird bugs when putting erc-bar-threshold to 0, and/or
putting overline instead of underline. I don't think those are my fault, but
I don't know how to fix them.

- It depends on erc-track

- It currently has to defadvice erc-track-mode, or chaos would ensue. I
remember seing somewhere advice were frowned upon in emacs code.

- I'm not a very experienced emacs coder, so some bugs may have slipped, and
the code may be inelegant.

If someone is willing to fix these issues though, it would be a nice
addition to an already great IRC client.
Antoine Levitt
2009/1/13 <[email-masked]>

> Hi smeuuh,
>
> I just asked[1] the ERC maintainers to include ErcBar[2] with ERC as a
> module enabled by default.
>
> A)  Just to verify:  the software license for ErcBar is the license
> stated at the bottom of the ErcBar webpage?
>
> B)  Do you know why copyright assignment is important?
>
> C)  I don't know if ErcBar requires copyright assignment.  If it does,
> are you willing to sign the form and mail it back to the Free Software
> Foundation?
>
> Please Reply to All.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> -Jason
>
> ^  [1].  http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=1892
> ^  [2].  http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErcBar
> --
> Jason Spiro: software/web developer, packager, trainer, IT consultant.
> I support Linux, UNIX, Windows, and more. Contact me to discuss your needs.
> +1 (416) 992-3445 / www.jspiro.com
>