ircd i18n, suggested protocol extension

[Per von Zweigbergk <pvz@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello.

Recently I received an e-mail from a person interested in the i18n of irssi (www.irssi.org, nice irc client, mainly ircnet-centric but can be configured for other net's quirks).

I had actually forgotten that irssi was i18nized (by 	me, even! :) because the themes where all in-client text is installed was not i18nized (but thats another story) but a LOT because the irc server sends text in english!

Note that I'm not trying to make ircd do some sort of babelfish translations, i'm just suggesting an i18n of messsages such as "End of /WHOIS list."

i18n of an irc server would be a tedious process, mainly because the current code doesn't have any such measures, but also because an irc protocol extention would be needed for the client to choose their language.

I don't remember if the IRCnet ircd sends a PING before letting the client in, but somehow the server would have to know the language before the MOTD was diplayed. I've thought of several possible kludgy solutions, like ircd sending an interesting PING message with a LANG query integrated in the ping text. Wouldn't break any clients, but might break some clients with the new protocol connecting to a server which happens to coincide with that protocol.

That's why I thought of sending a LANG message before sending the PING. An i18n-supporting IRC client would respond to the LANG before responding to the PING, but an older client would just ignore the LANG and just reply to the PING and defualt to English.

Any ideas on this approach? Except that it's a bit of work, that is.

I'm CC:ing this to the irssi-dev list, because it might interest some people there too.

// Per von Zweigbergk