Re: ircd.conf considerations

[borud@xxxxxxxxxxx]

[Christophe Kalt]
| 
| by solving some problems and making it easier to extend
| what we currently know as configuration lines; we will
| eventually run in the problem that it's not possible to
| send part of the configuration file via irc (what we
| currently know as /stats i, /stats c ...)

uhm, why do you think this would not be possible?  surely the server
reports "state" and does not read the config and echo it to the user
with the sensitive parts filtered out?  I see no conflict between a
sanitized configuration file format and the inability of the server to
report its current configuration.

| 1- how important is it for you to be able to query the
| daemon configuration while online?

it is preferable.  first and foremost because this indicates that the
server has read and understood my configuration file and secondly
because it saves me the hassle of logging into the IRC-server and
checking the file.

| 2- is it indispensable to be able to query _everything_?
| (for instance, we could imagine that some options/details
| may be left out, such as "compression level of a CN pair"
| [this option currently doesn't exist, gzip -1 or gzip -9])

as much as possible should be queryable online BUT I have a further
wish: there are some things that you could perhaps limit to
IRC-operators both to prevent /stats attacks and to give some (false?)
sense of privacy.  for instance (like now) regular users don't need to
se a list of currently logged on people, but for an IRC operator this
information can be useful at times (and no, I do not subscribe to the
opinions that some people have that everything an IRC-admin can see,
users should be able to see too.  after all, I don't publish the user
logs, I don't publish my HTTPD logs and I certainly do not publish my
Qmail-logs -- but they are still important to me when I need to find
problems or make educated guesses about the usage of the service)

| I want to point out that everything isn't currently
| queriable: R lines use an external program which may be
| anything, some of the M line field are never shown.(..?)

not everything is relevant or maybe even feasible to list online, but
in general, I'd like to know what my irc-server believes to be its
configuration. 

that aside, earlier on (a few months ago) you mentioned that someone
had started thinking about doing the config in SGML or XML and I think
I suggested that doing it with an extension-language might be an
option as well (although I don't think people would like that until
someone could produce a working implementation and demonstrate that it
won't be as awkward as they might think :-)  I for one did a project 1
month ago where I used a GPL'ed (now LGPL'ed) JavaScript interpreter
-- and lo en behold, the the non-programming users are now doing
things with the software it wasn't even designed to do originally
:-)). 

I'd like to hear what you had in mind 

-Bjørn