Publicly logged IRC channel for Bochs devs and users

[fuel-pcbox]

I've suggested this before, and it's been all but ignored, but why can't Bochs have a publicly logged IRC channel? Other projects do this and it works fine for them, AND that makes it searchable via Google if you really care about that so much. So many people are averse to ONLY communicating via GitHub Issues and Discussions, and I'm one of them. I just want more transparency in how this project operates and more openness to the project in general. That's all! I want to be able to stream of consciousness-style discuss things with other developers on how things should be done and stuff.

[fuel-pcbox]

It's been like, a week. Why no response?

[sskras]

Because of the small community, I guess.

[fysnet]

In my opinion, and I could be wrong, the number of Bochs users is dramatically less than the number of users of QEMU or other similar projects. At the moment (so I don't mistakenly miss someone, I won't name names), but I count only four people, including myself, who make up the majority of the contributors. Four, the number just before Five.

With only four people contributing to 80% to 90% of the project, I believe the current form, this github discussion, is completely and 100% adequate.

I can't give a number of how many people use Bochs on a regular basis, but I can image that it is much less than QEMU simply due to the speed difference. I myself, being one of those people when it comes to certain projects.

The addition of an IRC channel or another form of a discussion-based platform would, in my opinion, be very unnecessary, and in fact, detrimental to the way of communication, because now, not only would we need to monitor the current form of communication, but then we would have to watch many other forms, something I am not willing to do.

Would I like many more people to use Bochs, absolutely, but (again, in my opinion) creating an IRC channel or other similar item is not the way to do it.

Therefore, and again being 25% of the 80% to 90% contribution, I vote no.

[fuel-pcbox]

I would like to contribute to Bochs, but I absolutely HATE the way the project is currently run. I don't like GitHub Discussions to communicate with other devs.

[sskras]

Everybody interested in dynamic chat is welcome to irc://irc.newnet.net:6667/#Bochs.
There are more servers: https://www.newnet.net/servers.php

The related page / instructions are here, even if a bit dated: https://bochs.sourceforge.io/irc.html

For logs we could host some bot I guess. No ideas about the msg storage. Maybe the bot could just push the messages to the dedicated, new GitHub repository?