Re: How to IRC?

[Nicolas Richard <nrichard@ulb.ac.be>]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> "B. T. Raven" <btraven@nihilo.net> writes:
>
>> Anyway, wait for more authoritative suggestions.
>> Often I have to fall back on Chatzilla or another
>> client when dal.net won't connect. I don't know if
>> the problem is in one of my Emacs settings or what.
>
> Jude DaShiell <jdashiel@panix.com> writes:
>
>> irc in emacs gets disconnected every time when
>> connecting to freenode.net which is where erc goes
>> to connect. Why this is, I don't know.
>
> Okaaay...
>
> In theory as well as practice, unless practice is at
> an embarrassingly low level (and a wierd one at that),
> the IRC client shouldn't one bit influence the status
> of IRC as a network, and the client should be able to
> connect to any server that any other client is able to
> connect to.

An IRC client can have bugs (e.g. fail to respond to PING requests from
the IRC server for some reason), leading to it being disconnected more
often.

That being said, I never noticed any such disconnection problem with
rcirc, which I use. Some people on #emacs use ERC with a very impressive
uptime too, so I doubt rcirc or ERC have this sort of bugs.

OTOH, since emacs has only one lisp thread, when emacs is doing
something, it will most likely stop responding to ping requests and, if
it emacs is busy long enough, this can lead to disconnection. A common
suggestion (even though I don't follow it) is to use a separate emacs
session only for IRC.

-- 
Nicolas