ctrlproxy

After over 7 years of working on it off and on, I'm looking for somebody to help maintain (and eventually take over) CtrlProxy. I started working on CtrlProxy somewhere in 2002, only a short while after Wilmer started hacking on BitlBee. If I remember correctly I started working on it because I didn't want to run a separate dircproxy (the only real competitor at the time) instance (with configuration) for each IRC network that I connected to. It was also just a good excuse to play with the IRC protocol a bit.

Over the years, CtrlProxy has served as a playground for me to try out new and interesting things. It's been rewritten or severely refactored several times in its early history, the latest time being the 3.0 release (from 2005). I've tried different build systems, I've tried different implementation languages, I've tried different configuration file formats, I've tried different support libraries, I've tried different version control systems, I've tried different documentation formats. So while it's definitely been a very educational project for me personally, I haven't really had the time or the interest to dedicate to the project that it deserved during the last few years. This was mostly because there were other more interesting FOSS projects I spent my spare cycles on.

These days there are plenty of other good IRC proxies out there, such as BIP, so I doubt CtrlProxy will be missed if it were to disappear. Despite that, if anybody is interested in taking over, please send me an email (jelmer@samba.org) or contact me on IRC (jelmer on the OFTC and Freenode networks).

cp: Anathema - Shroud of False

After being ill on and off for a couple of days, I'm now feeling a lot better and am happily hacking again. I released CtrlProxy 3.0.4 yesterday, which mainly fixes a bunch of bugs and simplifies the configuration.

It's taking me more than a year and a half to become a Debian Developer, at first due to assignment being slow and my AM being unresponsive, in the last few months due to the fact that I haven't spent enough time working through P&P. Meanwhile, I've been added to the Debian Maintainers keyring, merely *7 hours* after applying. Thanks to my sponsors and the DM keyring maintainers for making this so quick :-)

For those not familiar with the difference between a Debian Developer and a Debian Maintainer: a Debian Maintainer is allowed to upload new versions of package for which he or she is maintainer, but can not upload new packages that are not in Debian yet without the help from a Debian Developer or for example participate in votes within Debian. The status of Debian Maintainer was added last month after it was endorsed by the project.

cp: Caravan - In the Land of Pink and Grey - It's Likely to have a Name Next Week

As of early next year, I'm moving to a student apartment at the university campus in Utrecht, approximately six kilometers from the village I live now. I'm getting the keys in january, but it'll probably take some time to collect all the stuff I need and move it. So far, the only furniture I have is a cd cabinet and a chair... If I'm significantly more unresponsive than usual in the next month or so, I'm probably busy with that sort of stuff. I'm really looking forward to it!

In software, some more point releases are at hand. There'll be a ctrlproxy 3.0.1 with a bunch of small bugfixes and the second bzr-svn release in two weeks, with a bunch of bugs fixed as well. bzr-svn is also in the Debian new queue now, and will hopefully be in the archive within a week or so.

Currently playing: Opeth - My Arms Your Hears.

Hmm, at 4 in the morning English grammar suddenly seems strange, confusing and illogical.

Almost two years after the last major release, we've released Ctrlproxy 3.0.0. The main focus has been on stability and efficiency (CPU, memory and bandwidth). Backlogs and channel states are now reported accurately and are now stored on disk rather than in memory (which was one of the fundamental problems with 2.6.

The most common bzr-svn bug (KeyError... ) has now also been fixed. Shallow branches / history horizons are becoming a real blocker for bzr-svn adoption so I might have a look at those next.

I've just released the first beta for ctrlproxy 3.0. It's probably too late for etch though :-/

The OpenChange folks announced today that they are making some progress!
OpenChange is a group of French FOSS developers that is trying to create an independent implementation of the network protocol used by Microsoft Outlook / Exchange.

Julien told me they are now able to create accounts from Outlook 2003.

Obligatory screenshot below

I wonder what sort of timeframe they are looking at for a release.

Wouter van Heyst has just released Bazaar 0.13rc1. No contributions from me this time 'round, hopefully I have more time for 0.14.

I've somewhat taken over maintainership of pam_krb5_migrate from vorlon and released 0.0.5.

Samba's 3.0.24 release is coming closer. It won't have the pidl changes that I've been working on yet, those have been postponed to 3.0.25. I'll see if I can get another Samba4 TP out as well in the next few weeks, now that Andrew is away on his honeymoon.

ctrlproxy 3.0 is also closer than ever with just two open bug reports...

It is amazing how hard it is to come up with a simple, usable and intuitive configuration file. I am currently in the process of creating a file format for the CtrlProxy configuration file.

The current one (as used in all earlier versions and the first 2.7 pre releases), has a couple of major flaws. First of all, it is in XML. While XML might not be a bad thing by itself, its verbosity is certainly a problem for manually-written configuration files as it requires a lot of typing.

Another problem with the current format is the fact that the user has to manually select which plugins to load, rather then select what features (s)he wishes to use. This can be a major problem, especially since ctrlproxy contains a lot of plugins out of the box, some of which should really be enabled by default.

The configuration files in other projects (as far as I've seen) tend to boil down to one of the following:

- Simple variable<->value files
- Windows Ini style files (variable<->value with sections)
- Turing-complete, based on some programming language
- XML/YAML
- Nested in some other form (such as with braces)

A configuration file that supports nested elements suits CtrlProxy best, as it has to store data for channels, which are part of networks. At the moment, I am very much tempted to adopt a format similar to the one used for irssi. Reasons for this move are the fact that users will usually be familiar with this format, and that it's easy to read and parse.

Over the past few weeks I have put more time into making some long due fixes to 2.7 bugs. The python callbacks mostly work now and several severe usability bugs have been fixed. The only things I'd like to fix before the first rc are:

- test and fix SSL support
- update documentation
- finish python module:
- pass client / network / line arguments correctly
- examples
- testing
- fix issue with loading state from linestack_file
- fix slowdowns when connecting
- sometimes connects twice after server closed connection

The folks from the bounzza.net bouncer mailed me (and a couple of other IRC proxy/bouncer authors) today asking for input on a common protocol for use with IRC bouncers (basically an extension to RFC2812). I haven't commented yet, and I'm not sure yet whether I'll be implementing this protocol.

Nemisus has published a HOWTO about running ctrlproxy on gentoo.

Ctrlproxy is discussed in two hacks in the upcoming O'Reilly title IRC Hacks, edited by Paul Mutton. Both articles were written by Wilmer van der Gaast.