Reevaluating choice of IRC network for our service bots

[James E. Blair]

Jeremy Stanley <fungi at yuggoth.org> writes:

> Because the OpenDev Collaboratory exists to serve the projects it
> hosts, input from project representatives and the Advisory Council
> is critical in deciding major changes to services. If projects were
> to move their channels to OFTC, the transition would not be
> seamless. In particular, differences in authentication (no SASL
> support, but you can authenticate your connection with a
> certificate[3] if you don't want to identify to the NickServ after
> connecting), permissions model (OFTC has coarse-grained RBAC
> designed to reduce channel mismanagement), and NickServ and ChanServ
> command syntax are among the challenges they're likely to face. The
> same IRC nicks may also not be available in some cases, though due
> to the generally smaller size of OFTC compared to Freenode this
> hopefully won't come up for too many users. On a positive note, we
> may be able to go back to not requiring nick registration just to
> join channels, easing onboarding for newcomers.
>
> If there is a consensus to move OpenDev's services to OFTC, or any
> other IRC network for that matter, this will entail a bit of
> development effort in order to accommodate the differences mentioned
> above. Please do note, however, that moving to a network other than
> OFTC would additionally mean we can't guarantee the availability of
> the same IRC channel names either, so that needs to be weighed in
> any decision. Some discussion[4][5][6] is already underway within
> the OpenStack community as to what they'd prefer, but we haven't
> heard much from other projects yet, so please do respond with your
> thoughts on the matter.

I prepared the following strawman and asked for feedback from the Zuul
community:


1) The current situation warrants relatively quick action (measured in
days), and therefore we should choose an IRC network and not broaden the
discussion to alternate technologies.

2) We're not opposed to exploring alternate technologies in the future.

3) Staying on FreeNode seems risky due to the control issues raised, the
declining availability of operators, and the likelihood of our
collaborators and potential collaborators wanting to avoid FreeNode in
the future, so we should probably move to a different network.

4) Either OFTC or libera.chat are equally acceptable IRC networks.

5) We derive value from close collaboration with the OpenDev sysadmins
and other OpenDev users, and would like to move our official #zuul
channel to whichever network achieves consensus with the rest of the
OpenDev community.

Based on feedback, I would also add:

6) We value collaboration with the Ansible community and would like to
maintain ties there.

It would be great if Ansible and OpenDev ended up on the same IRC
network.  But if they don't, I think we can deal with being on two
servers.

-Jim