Re: ircd i18n, suggested protocol extension

[Kurt Roeckx <Q@xxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2000 at 09:49:32PM +0200, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> > The easiest sollution I see for this problem is that the client
> > just sends a "LANG XXXX" request before sending either USER or
> > NICK.  It should always work.
> 
> Except might breaks some IRC proxies and maybe some weird ircds too.

An proxy should just forward things, specially if it doesn't know
about those commands.

ircd should generate an ERR_UNKNOWNCOMMAND (421), or optionally
just ignoring during authentication, like most do.

> > The strongest point against the PING is that it does not use the
> > name of the server sending the request.
> 
> What about changing ping to work like "PING :server <data>"? Server would 
> then always add the <data> to the PONG reply. This wouldn't necessarily need
> to work with remote servers (would be nice though), if client used "PING
> :remoteserver somedata" the server could just remove the somedata part.

Now the name of the server would be "server <data>".  If you said
"PING server <data>", it's wrong too. <data> would have to be my
nick.  I still wonder why the server sends a "PING :server",
with ':' tho.  It's in my TODO to remove that, altho it doesn't
hurt, since no data follows that.

As client I should either send "PONG mynick", or 
"PONG mynick server"

If the server sends a "PING a", that a is the name of my server,
so I can send a "PONG mynick a", "PONG mynick myserver", or just 
"PONG mynick".
If the server sends a "PING a b", then I can assume b is my nick,
so I send a "PONG b", "PONG b a", "PONG b myserver", "PONG mynick", 
"PONG mynick a", or "PONG mynick myserver".

Note that a client can send anything for mynick, the server will
change it to the correct one.  It could easely be a fix string.

A client can choise between alot different options when to reply
to the server, and you can only wonder why so many clients had a
problem with it.

The easiest thing to do as client is send "PONG mynick a".

> Server: PING :server LANGUAGE
> Old client: PONG :server LANGUAGE
> New client: PONG :server <language code(s)>

This simply won't work.

> Or if ip spoofing is still a problem it could add the random number between
> server and langauge.

It still is on certain OS's.


Kurt