IRC Chat links

[Daniel Bo]

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 1:35 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm at gnome.org> wrote:
> Why not just build the chat client directly into the help
> viewer? It's been discussed before.
IRC Live Help has been discussed several times before, I know. It haws
been stymied because it required an IRC client (see Zach, above),
which Ubuntu doesn't install by default. We'd need to install one. To
work cross-flavor, we would need to use xdg-open and then make
modifications to the MIME types to support this. It's just too much
work and it hasn't been pushed through.

We could alternatively put a javascript IRC client in Yelp itself, or
call one from an outside server. This may be the best long-term
solution.

My proposal was to release early and release often. Adding Freenode or
Mibbit links to the English documentation for default applications
will be fairly straightforward and something I can do before we freeze
for Maverick. I won't need a team, and if help doesn't materialize,
I'll be able to finish. The translation teams can choose how to alter
those links for their language as they see fit: some channels may not
be available for some languages.

We can edit these links later when a better solution is available.
Mibbit isn't a long-term solution. We can also add links for other
applications later in the release if we have time, or further along if
we don't.

I'm still unsure about whether to push help to official application
channels (Evolution is on irc.gimp.org) or to create an
#ubuntu-$APPLICATION channel on Freenode. If we go all Freenode, then
we don't need Mibbit, and this can be a long-term solution, but many
of these channels would likely be empty when a user needed help.

Daniel