On Thu 2021-05-27, Alin Marin Elena wrote:

on practical matters... will irc.opensuse.org be an alias for libera servers? nick name registration and cloak settings... what will happen.

Ah, good questions: As for nick names, Libera.Chat is a new platform, so you'll need to register your nicks from scratch (as several of us already did - had to do for registering openSUSE as a project). As for cloak settings, I'm deferring to the experts. Gerald

On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 2:15 PM Christian Boltz wrote:

Hello,

[I don't have a clear opinion on the move yet. Well, waiting for the dust to settle is probably a good idea. The only thing I know for sure is that moving all the people is the hardest part. Anyway, this mail is about a specific topic, which is...]

Am Donnerstag, 27. Mai 2021, 12:28:40 CEST schrieb Gerald Pfeifer:

...

As for cloak settings, I'm deferring to the experts.

I did the cloak setup for several members in the last years, not sure if that qualifies me as an "expert" ;-)

TL;DR: Here's your can of worms.

Longer version:

Assuming Libera uses a similar process for the cloak setup, then it's quite easy - the right people need to ping one of the Libera admins and ask them to setup the cloak "opensuse/member/$name" for $nickname.

Unfortunately that's only the second step.

The first step is knowing the nicknames, and since Libera is a new network, people can register with any nickname they want. This means the Freenode IRC nicks we know (see connect.opensuse.org) aren't worth much when it comes to Libera.

Now to the worms ;-)

Worm 1: We need to ask all members to tell us their Libera nickname, ideally in a way that ensures that it's really that member who tells us the nickname (= write it on a place where they can only store it after logging in).

Worm 2: where do we store it? connect.o.o (you know, that thing that needs a replacement since years) would be an obvious choice. However, none of the existing fields are a good fit for it, and I have no idea if/how we can add a field for the Libera nickname there. Besides that, I doubt that spending time on extending that dead horse makes sense.

Worm 3, still connect.o.o: We'll probably have to abuse another field - I tend to "about me" or "Brief description". And that means that our members have to use a defined format and literally need to write something like "Libera.Chat nickname: mynick".

Worm 3a ;-) We'll hate this workaround if we ever replace connect.o.o with something different and have to split the Libera nick out of the "about me" field.

Worm 4: connect.o.o doesn't send out notifications to the admins, therefore after adding the nick there everybody needs to send a mail to admin@ saying "Please cloak me on Libera.Chat, my connect page is https://connect.opensuse.org/pg/profile/$username".

In case you wonder: pointing to the connect page instead of just mentioning the nickname might sound like additional paperwork, but ensures that we setup the cloak for the correct nickname. (Doing this only by mail would make it possible to request a cloak "opensuse/member/cboltz" for the nickname "gerald" ;-) and while I hope that our members are not that evil, better safe than sorry.)

Speaking about the actual cloak, that's - surprise! - not a worm. We can probably re-use the content of the "Freenode IRC cloak" for Libera.

Worm 5 is to get the actual cloak setup done at Libera. In comparison to everything above, that's probably the easiest part.

The cloak is already reserved as part of our project registration with Libera. That's active *now*. I'm inclined to say we should just do 'sed -e "s/Freenode/Libera.Chat/g" -i -' and call it good for connect-o-o. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!

On 5/29/21 9:27 AM, Christian Boltz wrote:

Hello,

Am Freitag, 28. Mai 2021, 21:48:20 CEST schrieb Neal Gompa:

...

On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 2:15 PM Christian Boltz wrote:

...

TL;DR: Here's your can of worms. [...] The first step is knowing the nicknames, and since Libera is a new network, people can register with any nickname they want. This means the Freenode IRC nicks we know (see connect.opensuse.org) aren't worth much when it comes to Libera.

Now to the worms ;-) [...]

However, my worm 5 was more to get the cloak applied to our members, which needs to be done for each nick separately. (On Freenode, this meant an openSUSE admin asked one of the freenode admins to do it. I guess Libera handles it in a similar way.)

Yes projects are trying to be nice and batch up there requests.

...

I'm inclined to say we should just do 'sed -e "s/Freenode/Libera.Chat/g" -i -' and call it good for connect-o-o.

OK, more Gagh for you ;-)

You assume that for all our members, Freenode nick == Libera nick.

I would be *very* surprised if this is true for all our 530 Members.

People might choose a different nick on Libera. Or they might choose not to register at Libera, and (if we just do a mass-cloaking based on the data in connect.o.o) someone else would get their cloak without even knowing what openSUSE is.

Believe me - I thought twice before I wrote that mail ;-) I also would prefer a simple[tm] solution, but I'm afraid this isn't that simple.

Maybe rather then trying to find a complex solution thats perfect we should aim for a simple solution thats going to work for most users most quickly. That could look like 1. Rename the freenode field (or just use it as is) 2. give people write access to that field atm (currently I can't edit mine). 3. Email all members giving them a week to update the field if they care about there cloak or wipe it if they explicitly don't want one as well as to register there nick on Libera Chat. 4. Give the people at Libera chat a complete list to process at some point when they have a chance. The obvious issues with this approach is I don't know how hard 2 is to implement. There is the potential that someone who is not a openSUSE member registers the nick an existing member used on freenode and accidentally ends up with an openSUSE cloak. I don't think this will happen enough that its a big issue. Obviously this wont handle the cases where people don't update there nick in connect or haven't registered there nick on the new network. But obviously these people will have had some warning and by not acting they are showing its not that important to them. We can come up with a process for them and now members in the future. But with minimal approach from all sides this would get most people sorted. Cheers -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B

On 6/2/21 8:14 AM, Christian Boltz wrote:

Hello,

Am Samstag, 29. Mai 2021, 07:20:56 CEST schrieb Simon Lees:

...

On 5/29/21 9:27 AM, Christian Boltz wrote:

...

...

On Fri, May 28, 2021 at 2:15 PM Christian Boltz wrote:

...

TL;DR: Here's your can of worms. [...] Believe me - I thought twice before I wrote that mail ;-) I also would prefer a simple[tm] solution, but I'm afraid this isn't

Am Freitag, 28. Mai 2021, 21:48:20 CEST schrieb Neal Gompa: that simple.

Maybe rather then trying to find a complex solution thats perfect we should aim for a simple solution thats going to work for most users most quickly.

I'm afraid that would lead to https://bit.ly/3ccqLgJ ;-)

...

That could look like 1. Rename the freenode field (or just use it as is) 2. give people write access to that field atm (currently I can't edit mine). 3. Email all members giving them a week to update the field if they care about there cloak or wipe it if they explicitly don't want one as well as to register there nick on Libera Chat. 4. Give the people at Libera chat a complete list to process at some point when they have a chance.

Right, doing a batch request makes sense - but that's a technical detail.

...

The obvious issues with this approach is I don't know how hard 2 is to implement.

Welcome to the club (I also don't know, and am not too keen to spend time on this dead horse), and congratulations for finding another worm I didn't mention ;-) (and guess why I proposed to (ab)use the "about me" field ;-)

...

There is the potential that someone who is not a openSUSE member registers the nick an existing member used on freenode and accidentally ends up with an openSUSE cloak. I don't think this will happen enough that its a big issue.

You assume that the content of the "Freenode IRC nick" field is (still) correct for everybody.

No, I assume its correct for most people and that others would update it if they care enough (presuming we make that possible).

Try to mail all members, and you'll find out how up-to-date the mail addresses are. Most people tend to care about keeping their @o.o mail address working, and nevertheless, there will be several undeliverable mail addresses.

I guess it would also be wise to email project as well.

The IRC nickname typically gets entered when requesting membership, and (nearly) never updated. Therefore I'm quite sure it it's more often outdated (= wrong) than the mail address.

At the same time people who go to the effort of registering there IRC nicks tend to almost never change them and if they do they still keep the old one around.

(+ people might have a different nick on Libera, or didn't register there, or ...)

...

Obviously this wont handle the cases where people don't update there nick in connect or haven't registered there nick on the new network. But obviously these people will have had some warning and by not acting they are showing its not that important to them. We can come up with a process for them and now members in the future. But with minimal approach from all sides this would get most people sorted.

I know my method causes a bit more work, but yours sounds like https://bit.ly/3ccqLgJ [yes, same link as above].

I'll kinda agree with that picture other then 90 - 95% simply choose to walk across the bridge to the side and in reality the cliff edge is only about 1m high, which was enough for me to once break a finger but wont cause any more serious injuries. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B

On 5/27/21 7:58 PM, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

On Thu 2021-05-27, Alin Marin Elena wrote:

...

on practical matters... will irc.opensuse.org be an alias for libera servers? nick name registration and cloak settings... what will happen.

Ah, good questions: As for nick names, Libera.Chat is a new platform, so you'll need to register your nicks from scratch (as several of us already did - had to do for registering openSUSE as a project).

As for cloak settings, I'm deferring to the experts.

Given we didn't get far with that i'd like to propose a solution away from connect. I think the easiest way would be to create a temporary wiki page that requires you to be logged in to edit then we give members a week to write there nick and the cloak they would like, then one of our nominated contacts can give the list to the Libera.Chat staff and most people who care will be setup. This would give us a way to verify each request by looking at the wiki history should we choose to. If we wanted it to be easier to verify we could use a ticket on code.opensuse.org but then it would be slightly harder to extract the list. If no one has strong objections about this i'll start the process when I have some time which will likely be after the conference. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B

On 6/16/21 10:17 AM, Neal Gompa wrote:

On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 8:46 PM Simon Lees wrote:

...

On 5/27/21 7:58 PM, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:

...

On Thu 2021-05-27, Alin Marin Elena wrote:

...

on practical matters... will irc.opensuse.org be an alias for libera servers? nick name registration and cloak settings... what will happen.

Ah, good questions: As for nick names, Libera.Chat is a new platform, so you'll need to register your nicks from scratch (as several of us already did - had to do for registering openSUSE as a project).

As for cloak settings, I'm deferring to the experts.

Given we didn't get far with that i'd like to propose a solution away from connect. I think the easiest way would be to create a temporary wiki page that requires you to be logged in to edit then we give members a week to write there nick and the cloak they would like, then one of our nominated contacts can give the list to the Libera.Chat staff and most people who care will be setup. This would give us a way to verify each request by looking at the wiki history should we choose to. If we wanted it to be easier to verify we could use a ticket on code.opensuse.org but then it would be slightly harder to extract the list.

Why would it be harder to extract the list?

If we setup the wiki page right you'd be able to copy everything straight into an email from the page, if we used a ticket in code.opensuse.org everyones entry would be a separate comment and we'd have to go through and collate them. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B

On Thu, May 27 2021 at 15:23:56 +0200, Michal Suchánek wrote:

It might be reasonable to ask if some more recent protocol like Matrix would be less prone to issues like this.

Indeed it is! The issue being that our instance still isn't ready, because our last try to get the authentication working with Bernhard didn't really succeed. I need to steal a SUSE IT employee for an afternoon to set it up one day (which may be hard, considering I assume they are busy)

With more modern protocols with native authentication it might be also easier for people to connect than navigating the baroque maze of antispam measures that have been attached on top of IRC over time.

That would be true, if it wasn't for Matrix clients not implementing SSO for the most part, which is kind of a requirement for us to use the existing login system. I know of 2 clients that implement it in the entire ecosystem. That would be easy to work around if they allowed for authenticating with authentication token provided by another client which is signed in, but sadly that's apparently also pretty rare...

Unfortunaltey, the openSUSE community over at Matrix does not look particularly thriving.

Huh? We are so active on matrix, have a look at the rooms listed in #space:opensuse.org space or old +rooms:opensuse.org community. Some rooms aren't really used much, since they are waiting for the irc bridge to happen, but the rooms that are used are used so much. LCP [Sasi] https://lcp.world

On Thu, May 27, 2021 at 03:36:03PM +0200, Sasi Olin wrote:

On Thu, May 27 2021 at 15:23:56 +0200, Michal Suchánek wrote:

...

It might be reasonable to ask if some more recent protocol like Matrix would be less prone to issues like this.

Indeed it is! The issue being that our instance still isn't ready, because our last try to get the authentication working with Bernhard didn't really succeed. I need to steal a SUSE IT employee for an afternoon to set it up one day (which may be hard, considering I assume they are busy)

...

With more modern protocols with native authentication it might be also easier for people to connect than navigating the baroque maze of antispam measures that have been attached on top of IRC over time.

That would be true, if it wasn't for Matrix clients not implementing SSO for the most part, which is kind of a requirement for us to use the existing login system. I know of 2 clients that implement it in the entire ecosystem. That would be easy to work around if they allowed for authenticating with authentication token provided by another client which is signed in, but sadly that's apparently also pretty rare...

There is a reason for it. For the general user the value of SSO with Matrix is pretty low. You still need your encryption keys to read encrypted rooms (and direct messages) and those aren't on the SSO server. Also if opensuse hosts opensuse rooms on own server but uses federation then people do not need to re-register in the first place because they can access the rooms from whatever homeserver they happened to be registered with. And if one homeserver splits in two that block each other that does not affect the ability of people on either to access the opensuse rooms. Then there is not much point in taking over a home server in the first place and it is much less likely for such situation to evolve. Thanks Michal

Sasi Olin schrieb:

...

With more modern protocols with native authentication it might be also easier for people to connect than navigating the baroque maze of antispam measures that have been attached on top of IRC over time.

That would be true, if it wasn't for Matrix clients not implementing SSO for the most part, which is kind of a requirement for us to use the existing login system. I know of 2 clients that implement it in the entire ecosystem.

As Mozilla has switch from IRC to Matrix due to multiple reasons (including spam defense as well as the requirement to be able to enforce community guidelines so synchronous chat can be a safe place for everyone) and is using SSO for users created on their instance (people from elsewhere can still join all the rooms via federation though), I checked Mozilla's wiki page for clients they list as supported with SSO: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Clients There are more than 2 listed there already, and the list may not be complete as the last edit of the page was 2 months ago. And even without SSO, Matrix is definitely "easier for people to connect than navigating the baroque maze of antispam measures that have been attached on top of IRC over time" IMHO - even more so as you can e.g. have a home server that requires SSO but is federated so people can even log into another server without SSO and then join rooms on yours, like Mozilla did. (That said, Mozilla isn't actually operating that instance themselves but pay Element to do that for them.) KaiRo

On Fri, 28 May 2021 03:42:54 +0200, Robert Kaiser wrote:

And even without SSO, Matrix is definitely "easier for people to connect than navigating the baroque maze of antispam measures that have been attached on top of IRC over time" IMHO - even more so as you can e.g. have a home server that requires SSO but is federated so people can even log into another server without SSO and then join rooms on yours, like Mozilla did. (That said, Mozilla isn't actually operating that instance themselves but pay Element to do that for them.)

Whatever client (don't want a bikeshed) required for whatever protocol Note that moving from IRC to whatever might gain new people, but for sure also will chase people away. I've seen the move from IRC to Slack and Mattermost and several other and *NONE* (IMHO) were improvements over IRC. IRC make me have a simple neverending log in which I can search fast. All the "modern" stuff like Teams, Slack, Mattermost and Matrix have "enhanced" GUI's that just bloat the information being shared. IRC is extremely simple: it is text and text only (Unicode enables some smileys etc, but at least it has no shit like stickers and animated gif's like Telegram and friends. When moving away from IRC (for whatever reason) you will take away a valuable source of contact with the user base. My 2¢

KaiRo

-- H.Merijn Brand https://tux.nl Perl Monger http://amsterdam.pm.org/ using perl5.00307 .. 5.33 porting perl5 on HP-UX, AIX, and Linux https://tux.nl/email.html http://qa.perl.org https://www.test-smoke.org