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

[Antoine Levitt]

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 <jasonspiro@gmail.com>

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://emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1892
^  [2].  http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErcBar
--
Jason Spiro: software/web developer, packager, trainer, IT consultant.
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