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Comment by rakoo | Hacker News Reader

How would that work ? cURL is built for request-reply usecases, with potentially long-lived connections, but once connected the handling happens outside of curl. irc is an interactive protocol, meaning that requests and replies would be handled inside cURL.

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Yet, Curl supports TELNET.

Another potential use case for IRC is scripting a data collector to connect, run /list on a number of IRC networks, and disconnect. Eg, something similar to whatever netsplit.de does to collect its statistics.

But then, given the ability to connect to IRC via TELNET, perhaps Curl can already claim support for IRC.

Yeah that's my point: that would be like saying cURL supports XMPP because there are HTTP/web socket bridges, but that's not the point.

I guess cURL could connect, with, send a message and leave, or list rooms, but that's already a hack on the original use case of IRC. And it's only a small fraction of what IRC is used for, namely people interacting with each other. "Supporting IRC" would mean at least that.

An example: A git hook that joins a channel every time a commit is pushed to its master branch, to inform an existing IRC bot, that it is time to pull the newest changes from the repository.

This _really_ sounds out of scope for what curl is

Use netcat instead?

  printf "NICK gitbot42\nUSER foo bar baz\nPRIVMSG #gitevents :pull now\nQUIT :foobar\n" | nc irc.server.foo 6667

Oh of course, I am not waiting on cURL to support IRC. Rather I was suggesting a use case, where essentially the client logs in, performs a series of commands and then disconnects. And I feel that is fitting with how cURL operates.

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