IRC
From OSGeo Wiki
Much OSGeo related communication happens in IRC (Internet Relay Chat), an instant messaging protocol. Lots of general information on IRC is available in Wikipedia.
Contents |
Clients
IRC requires IRC client software. There are a wide variety of clients available. The ChatZilla client is available for Firefox users on all platforms.
IRC uses a TCP/IP port which is often blocked in environments with strictly managed internet access. In these environments it is still possible to use http based clients such as:
Channels
The primary OSGeo channel is #osgeo on the irc.freenode.net network. Generally speaking you would connect to irc.freenode.net and then issue the "/join #osgeo" command or possibly follow the irc://irc.freenode.net/osgeo URL.
Other channels of interest:
Projects
- #fdo - Feature Data Objects
- #featureserver - FeatureServer
- #foss4g2008 - FOSS4G 2008 conference organization
- #gdal - GDAL/OGR project (as well as FWTools, PROJ.4)
- #geonetwork - Geonetwork Open Source
- #geotools - GeoTools (also to some extent GeoServer, uDig)
- #grass - GRASS GIS
- #mapbender - Mapbender
- #mapguide - MapGuide Open Source (and Enterprise)
- #mapserver - MapServer and some MapServer based frameworks
- #metacrs - MetaCRS
- #openlayers - OpenLayers
- #ossimplanet - OSSIM project
- #postgis - PostGIS
- #proj - PROJ.4
- #qgis - Quantum GIS
Local Chapters
- #osgeo-es - Capítulo Local de la comunidad hispano-hablante
- #osgeo-fr - Francophone language OSGeo Chapter
- #gfoss - Italian language OSGeo Chapter
Other
- #geojson
- #kml
- #moss4g
Etiquiette
- Don't ask to ask, just go ahead and ask your question.
- Don't paste large chunks of text into IRC channels. If you want to present a code or configuration file snippet to others to look at use a "pasting service" like http://rafb.net/paste to host the snippet, and then paste the url to it into the IRC channel.
- If you want the attention of a particular person, include their nick in the message and they will generally be alerted (flashed, bell rung, etc).
- Give folks a while to respond. They are usually multi-tasking and might not look at IRC for a while.
- If an active conversation is going on, wait for a lull to raise a different topic (a minute of inactivity for instance)
Logs
Many popular OSGeo related channels are logged. The #osgeo channel logs are at:
Other logs may also be found under:
http://logs.qgis.org/<add project name>
Some channels (ie. #mapserver and #osgeo) are also logged on IRSeek (http://www.irseek.com), an IRC search engine.
