!channels

[Christophe Kalt <kalt@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

In the upcoming 2.10.2 version, we finally address some
issues that were left aside in the earlier versions.  It
might actually be a good time to do more changes.
There are couple questions in this email, feedback is appreciated.

All I am suggesting here are changes which affect user
friendliness.. no major change could be done at this point.

a brief summary on !channels:
	(also see http://www.stealth.net/~kalt/irc/channel.html)

/join !!foo will create channel !<ID>foo
/join !foo will join one of possibly many !<ID>foo (many is very unlikely)
/list !foo will (2.10.2) list all !<ID>foo channels

#1: should /join !foo fail if there are several !<ID>foo's ?
    (for consistency with most commands? see below.  But i
     think /join is an exception)

all channel related commands understand !<ID>foo names which
is really the REAL channel name and preferred name
(preferred in the protocol sense of it, users would prefer
one without <ID>)

At this point it is probably fairly easy to make all
commands understand !foo (in the case it's unique, which it
should pretty much always be).

I am EXTREMELY reluctant to do such a thing.

#2: I believe clients (at the very list, aliases) should
    easily take care of this and make it friendly to the
    user.

I am reluctant because I feel that someday we'll regret
this, and once all users will be used to this, it'll be very
hard to make them change.

The danger is that !foo is NOT enough to identify a unique
name (otherwise, why would we bother with IDs?).

if !QWERTfoo exists, I could create !<ID>QUERTYfoo, in which
case !QWERTYfoo is now _very_ ambiguous.