Request: Colloquy (IRC client for OS X)

[Sam.Halliday@…]

This is an RFE to create a macport for ​http://colloquy.info which is a really fantastic native OS X IRC client. Source code is available.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

I'm familiar with Colloquy; I've used it.

In what way would adding this to MacPorts be an improvement for you over just visiting ​http://colloquy.info/downloads.html and downloading it? The software we usually add to MacPorts is that which is not so easily downloadable.

Further, as I read their site, it says the current version works on Lion and up. That's a bit of a damper, as we usually want ports that work on at least Snow Leopard and up, preferably Tiger and up.

[Sam.Halliday@…]

As with all OSS, it would be better distributed in Macports because it would use system libraries instead of bundled versions (e.g. growl), but primarily because it would be part of the "port updated outdated" process for keeping software up to date. If an application is not part of macports or App Store, then I find it requires additional effort to keep it up to date. Exceptions include large pieces of software such as Microsoft Office and Netbeans, which provide their own update managers.

I could ask the same question you have just posed to a wide variety of macport software!

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Cc Me!

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Besides Growl, it could also use the MacPorts svn, SASL, python, SILC, and F-Script. There could also be separate ports added for its other bundled frameworks, such as ChatCore, Acid (which depends on expat, jabber, and md5sha1sum, each of which MacPorts provides, and an XPath engine, which MacPorts has a few of), AGRegex (which depends on pcre, which Macports provides), XMPPframework (which depends on libidn, which Macports provides, and CocoaLumberjack and CocoaAsyncLogger, neither of which MacPorts provides yet), and PortMapper (which depends on miniupnpc, which MacPorts provides, and libnatpmp, which MacPorts doesn't yet provide).

[zach@…]

Hi, I'm Zach. I'm one of the main developers of Colloquy. Someone just filed a ticket on our trac asking me to look here.

To Sam's original point of Growl, Colloquy links against a version of the Growl framework, but, that will not stop it from using a newer version if it is present on the system (since the Growl folks are kind enough to keep API compatibility here). Same goes for F-Script.

As far as the rest of the frameworks that Colloquy uses are concerned… the SILC framework we use doesn't appear to be in MacPorts, nor is Acid (our Jabber framework) or AGRegex or, well, any of the dependencies of Colloquy. Some of them aren't even available in forms that work well as libraries (AsyncSocket, and our SASL code, for example).

Plus, Colloquy is built as a pretty standard Mac app. It assumes that most (aside from Growl and F-Script) non-system frameworks will be shipped within the app bundle. I'm not sure what the benefit of changing this is.

Bottom line (as far as I can see) is that it seems like there would be a ton of work involved in making this happen for very little gain. Its not like Colloquy is hard to download, or keep up to date.

I'm in #colloquy on Freenode if you have any other questions.

[cooljeanius (Eric Gallager)]

Replying to zach@…:

Hi, I'm Zach. I'm one of the main developers of Colloquy. Someone just filed a ticket on our trac asking me to look here.

That was me, the link to that ticket is ​http://colloquy.info/project/ticket/3532

(It was closed as wontfix)

[larryv (Lawrence Velázquez)]

This doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen. If anyone wants to give it a shot, they’re of course more than welcome to submit a portfile (or several portfiles, it seems).