IRC webchat is down. What does this mean for PyPA?

Packaging
1

Not sure if this is the right place for this, but I found this in a failed docs build for Twine:

522 Server Error:  for url: https://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=%23pypa

It’s been a couple days, and it also affects the IRC links on Project Summaries — Python Packaging User Guide. I’m not an IRC user, so I don’t know if this means the PyPA IRC channel is unavailable.

Could someone with more IRC experience/authority recommend a fix?

2

Freenode suffered a hostile administrative takeover, and this week the new owner decided to scrap the the whole database and move to a new infrastructure.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Free-Software-Exits-Freenode

We have moved to liberachat.

https://web.libera.chat/

2 Likes
3

FYI, you can directly link to https://web.libera.chat/#pypa,#pypa-dev instead.

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4

For Matrix users, Libera Chat also set up a bridge so one can also join
e.g. #pypa:libera.chat directly.

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5

I’ll do a round of PRs sometime soon, updating the IRC links to point to libera.chat for various PyPA projects to make things easier for the projects to move away from Freenode.

I imagine no one feels like sticking with Freenode, but if the maintainers of some project do, please say so here or feel free to close the PR I’ll file for this (instead of merging it). :slight_smile:

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6

Is IRC a PyPA thing or some PyPA projects thing? :thinking: I know virtualenv/build does not follow IRC and uses Discord instead… but now I’m wondering if this topic always has been a per-project-based thing (and just happened the core set in past used IRC) or did we document IRC as the generic PyPA thing somewhere.

7

Thanks all. For reference, I made the changes in Twine’s documentation, as well as linking to this forum:

One gotcha was that the https://web.libera.chat/#pypa links caused Sphinx’s linkcheck to fail, so I ended up ignoring that pattern.

1 Like
8

I opened a PR to update the links on packaging user guide. This might be a good opportunity for project maintainers to update their preferred communication channels:

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I am on IRC, so pypa/build can provide support in some capacity there, though I think I am the only maintainer.

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It used to be a PyPA thing, but PyPA has grown+changed a lot. :slight_smile:

I don’t think anyone is dictating that PyPA projects interact with users over IRC / Discord / [bespoke chat platform].

If a project doesn’t wanna be present on IRC, they shouldn’t mention it as a support channel in their documentation. And, if they do wanna have IRC, they’ll likely get a PR from me to update the Freenode link to libera.chat.