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Tendril is a Words client. Or maybe it's more of a meta-client, since it manages a whole fistful of Perspectives (aka words Participants) at once. Or maybe it's words' ircservice turned inside-out, because yeah, there's some IRC in it. Instead of providing an IRC server which people log on to with their IRC clients to talk to the Words service, Tendril is an IRC Client which lives with a Words service. Tendril logs on to a remote IRC server, and once there, creates a words Participant for everyone it sees. This gives it an advantage over joining Bridgette to the Words irc service, as there everyone shows up as a single Participant "ry". Since Tendril creates a Participant for every IRC user it represents, each one appears in the words group just as they would if they had all logged directly into the Words service. The difference is <ry> Acapnotic joined on OPN <ry> <Acapnotic@opn> Hi! versus: Acapnotic@opn joined! <Acapnotic@opn> Hi! ... And yes, the link goes in the other direction too; the conversation that goes on in the Words group is reported back to the IRC channel. But because I didn't think IRC operators would appreciate having 20 clients logged in from the same sever to represent 20 words Participants, when viewed from the IRC side everyone appears to be speaking through one "bot"; from this end it looks just like Bridgette. By putting multiple Tendrils connected to different IRC networks in the same Words group, you can duplicate Bridgette's effect of joining IRC networks together. Since tendril operates transparently on the Words side, you needn't worry about an ugly chained relay effect when you do this, even though the Tendrils to the different IRC networks are separate entities. <ry1> <ry2@opn> <foo@efnet> Don't worry, Tendril won't look like this. In addition to linking IRC channels to Words groups, Tendril also converts between private /msgs and Words directMessages, so can tell your Words client to "Start conversation with... Acapnotic@opn", and Acapnotic will receive your messages via msg over the IRC network, and you will see Acapnotic's replies in your conversation window. One final bonus for the IRC freaks: Tendril has a kludge (feature!) to broker DCC handshakes between IRC networks. This doesn't mean that Tendril receives a file over DCC and sends it out again, it only passes the *handshake*, and because Direct Client Connections operate entirely outside the IRC network, this actually works. The big motivation behind Tendril is now if I want to write an IRC bot, I don't need to write it for IRC. I write it as a words client and put it on a words service instead. If there's already a tendril from that channel to a Words service, then I can have my words bot sign on to that service, otherwise I could run a tendril+words service locally with just my bot signed on, and that'd work too. (Actually, the aforementioned DCC handshake brokering could probably be broken out into a separate Words bot, assuming IRC clients have implemented CTCP correctly. Having a Words bot for something that's exclusively an IRC feature is a bit peculiar though.) "I-think-that's-a-long-enough-introduction"ly yours, - Kevin -- Kevin Turner <acapnotic@twistedmatrix.com> | OpenPGP encryption welcome here The moon is waxing gibbous, 89.0% illuminated, 11.6 days old.
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Kevin Turner