GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 589711
Support mapping irc channels with geoclue.
Last modified: 2009-08-26 17:01:38 UTC
I know the irc support in empathy is quite unfinished but I thought I would file this for future reference. I would like to be able to map IRC channels and networks to a user's location so that we can do cool things. For example in the Ubuntu project right now users get dumped into an #ubuntu channel when they fire up their IRC channel, which gets unwieldy (over 1000 users). I think it would be awesome if Empathy used the user's location to join a user to whatever local team is closest, so for example if you're in the UK it would join you to #ubuntu-uk. I chatted with Daf about this at debconf and we agreed that this is kind of specific and not something that is probably not useful to the pure upstream project, but perhaps we can make something generic that other projects can use to take advantage of geoclue.
There is a super-easy fix for that: Add the channel to join in translations. So you join _("#ubuntu") and french translation will change that to "#ubuntu-fr". After all, you don't care speaking with people of your country, but with people speaking the same language ;) But that have to be an ubuntu-specific patch. IIRC, someone did such change in xchat-gnome.
I agree with Xavier. Users should join a channel based on their language, not their location.
Closing as NOTABUG as that's a downstream issue and Geolocation is probably not the right answer anyway.