Extensions to the protocol.

[Kurt Roeckx <Q@xxxxxxx>]

I would like some standart way for clients and servers to allow
setting certain options.

I'm thinking about commands the server knows, things like nick
length maybe.  There are people that want SSL.  Different
language support.  I'm sure you can find some other options.

You want to know some of those things before you authenticate
yourself to the server.  The question is how can we do it
cleanly.

You can do it in two ways, either the client, or the server,
sends "something" first, that should tell the other that he
supports this.  Or maybe both.

If the clients has to know it before it wants to register, it's
always going to have to wait for the server to give a reply.  So
that doesn't help much in selecting one of those options.

The client doesn't want to wait too long for the server to say
that it supports it, else it might get disconnected.  I think
the client could set an option to wait for the server, if it
knows that it supports it.

It sometimes takes some times before a server accepts the
connection, and starts processing it.  So it could take a while
too if the server sends something from the moment it accepts the
connection.

Since the client is going to have to wait, it should probably
default to short (10 seconds?) timeout, or no timeout, if it's
sure that the server supports it.

I think the easiest thing is that the server just sends some
numerics on connect, to say what it supports, but I have no idea
how certain clients, or servers, are going to react on that.
The client could then send the commands based on that.

We could also send those numerics after the clients asks for
them, specially if just sending them breaks things.  Some clients
might even ask for it after they have authenticated themself.

What do you people think might be good?


Kurt