Bug#795864: Please make joining channels optional

[Andras Korn <korn-debbugs@elan.rulez.org>]

Package: irker
Version: 2.12+dfsg-1
Severity: wishlist
Tags: upstream

Hi,

currently irker unconditionally joins channels it is asked to make
announcements to.

However, if a channel is not mode +n (or whatever the local equivalent of
this channel mode on a particular IRC network is), it's possible to send
PRIVMSGs to channels without joining them.

This may be preferable for several reasons:

 * no join/part messages _at all_

 * no need to establish more than one connection to the irc server to be
   able to reach dozens of channels

I modified line 106 of irkerd to read:

                    if ((channel not in self.channels_joined) and (message == "")):

This way it's hopefully still possible to make irkerd join a channel by
asking it to announce the empty string, but it won't join channels by
default anymore.

I think this is not the best solution, though -- for one thing, it breaks
installations that depend on the previous behaviour.

A new command line switch seems a cleaner way of doing this. Alternatively,
since upstream seems to insist that policy belongs in hook scripts and not
irkerd, the JSON API could be extended with a boolean "join" field which
could default to true or false, depending on the irkerd command line. Then
hook scripts would be able to decide what messages/channels merit joining.

Andras

-- 
                       Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?