As many of you already know, I have been experimenting with quassel for the last couple of months.  Quassel is a very decent client, but it’s simply not for me.  As a result, I’ve been thinking about the future of Conspire.  Here is what I have decided:

Work will begin immediately on Conspire 2.0

Conspire 2.0 will be built ontop of the latest additions to the atheme platform, such as mowgli.coroutine and libneco.  These additions will allow us to increase our stability and reliability without having to worry about implementation details in the client.  However, mowgli.coroutine has not been mainlined yet, so this will be a couple of weeks out.

Usage of mowgli.coroutine and libneco are already planned for the next atheme-services release to improve robustness and performance of that software.

Modularity

Conspire 2.0 will be reworked to place the RFC1459+extensions/IRC3 protocols in the plugins space, so that other plugins may be implemented, such as a libpurple interface.  This allows the conspire user to manage all of his chat activities from a single application with a consistent interface.

This will be achieved through ensuring that everything in the core is cleanly hooked, and then moving most of the core into the plugin space.  In addition, many parts of the core will be replaced with code from atheme-services, including the xchat IRC line parser.

DCC Support

DCC support will likely be dropped.  DCC is a horribly designed protocol plagued with many security problems.  This will also allow us to drop our UPnP code.  Users should use services like Omploader and Rapidshare if they wish to share files over IRC.

Support for IRC 3.1 client profile features

Support for IRC 3.1 client profile features like RENAME will be added.  This will ensure that Conspire remains at the leading edge of IRC protocol development.