Better SCM Initiative : Discuss on IRC

The IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a mechanism to have textual conversations with several people at once over the Internet. We have set up a channel for discussing version control and source configuration management. It is #scm on the Freenode IRC Network. Hope to see you all there.

The rest of this page explains how to connect to the IRC from your machine.

How to talk on the IRC?

IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, and it is a distributed, real-time form of communication, that was common from relatively early in the history of the Internet and is still very popular. IRC servers form networks of servers - each network is separated from the other networks and the servers of each network share the same chat-rooms, user profiles and messages. Each network has different rules and conventions and a different culture. This allows chat-rooms (called channels in IRC-jargon) with the same name to exist in different networks.

Some popular IRC clients include the cross-platform Chatzilla (which is open source and free-of-charge and can be installed as an add-on for the Firefox browser), HexChat, a cross-platform, open source and free-of-charge IRC client (which runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X), and the Windows-based mIRC (which is shareware and not open-source). Furthermore, there are also web-based interfaces for chatting on IRC networks.