Rocket.chat: Support TTY-styled chat connect; compatible with IRC Clients

[ghost]

Are there any plans to add support for connecting to RocketChat from IRC clients? (Like connecting to irc.slack.com through XChat)

Support for buffering unread messages and also notifications for edited/deleted messages would be a nice addition. (Slack doesn't do either of these; there is no way of knowing if messages are edited/deleted, and new messages are lost when disconnected.)

This would be a very nice feature to have, IRC clients take up very little resources.

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[pierreozoux]

Is it a duplicate of https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/216 ?

[ghost]

No.

The existing rocketchat-irc is for connecting to an existing IRC server, not acting as an IRC server for clients.

If you read what was said in https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/216#issuecomment-143717401 and compared that to my feature request, you would already know that this isn't a duplicate.

[Sing-Li]

No. There is no plan to do so.

Two major engineering steps required:

1. create and implement a TTY styled protocol that covers everything we do reactively
2. make that protocol work for IRC clients

PRs welcomed from any devs or groups that need this badly.

[toxicgumbo]

With the answer being "no plan to do so", no developer interest expressed, and no ongoing development, I recommend this issue be closed. If interest changes, this issue can serve as a placemarker for a new initiative or can be reopened. As a personal note, I can see the value in using Rocket.Chat from external clients, but given its evolving codebase as an independent and "modern" environment, I can't see developers making Rocket.Chat a second-class citizen to IRC.

[purp]

Howdy! Please take this as developer interest, though not sure I've got the time or the skills required.

Separately, this isn't an issue of being a second-class citizen to IRC; this is an issue of meeting folks where they are (many of whom are in IRC for other reasons) and not requiring them to adopt a separate client when they've already got one deeply rooted in their workflow.

I suppose it's arguable that we should connect a whole IRC server to our Rocket instance a la #216, but in our specific case it's not advisable nor practical.

[LongLiveCHIEF]

I second @purp's comments. I do _everything_ in a terminal these days, and having to exit fullscreen, or switch to different workspace to chat/view messages with my team in a web/desktop client is a bit disruptive. (Programmer's, ADD, etc...).

It's not a must have, but it's definitely a "would love to have". It would also add the advantage of being easily used from my CI/CD tools without even requiring webhooks, as well as being easily dockerized.

I've got enough interest in it, that before I found this issue, I was exploring the idea of creating a client myself. Figured I should check to see if one was already in progress. I don't think it's something I would want to do alone, but if several people wanted to get together to work on it, I would happily contribute to the effort.

[geekgonecrazy]

I'm going to close in favor of #216 and #10113

Specifically #10113 basically will allow you to deploy an ircd that will be federated with Rocket.Chat and you will be able to connect to Rocket.Chat via irc.