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talk talk | |
June 25th, 2021 | |
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I've got a talk daemon running on cosmic.voyage. That's right, the | |
old one-on-one real-time chat program 'talk(1)'. In fact, I've got | |
ytalk(1) installed, which is even better. This morning I was | |
talking about talk and realized I'd never seen an RFC for it. So | |
I went looking... | |
And found nothing. There is no RFC for talk. At all. Others did | |
some searching too and came up with the same result. I _did_ find | |
some forums talking about their own search for and RFC and coming | |
to the same conclusion. As best I can tell, the only way to figure | |
out how it works is to look at the code running the clients and | |
the servers and work backwards. [0] | |
[0]Like this | |
So what? Well, in our little corner of internet history it seems | |
like quite an oversight. How did this awesome little tool get | |
missed. It's mentioned by name in the netequette RFC [1] and | |
discussed at length, but there's no implementation rules actually | |
codified anywhere. Wild! | |
[1] RFC 1855 | |
It's also a missed opportunity to breath new life into something | |
ancient. With a bit better documentation we could have new talk | |
daemons and clients in a heartbeat. Look at that first link above | |
and ask yourself how long it would take you to code your own today | |
in C or Go or Python or Lua or Perl or Forth or whatever your | |
party language is? We could have sexy clients and robust servers | |
next week. With the recent finger revival discovery of users is | |
super simple again in the tildeverse and other pubnixes. Layer in | |
some good ol' fashioned talk and now we're cooking with gas. | |
And hey, since there's no bloody RFC to hold us back, why not slap | |
some TLS on that bad-boy and make a neotalk that's secure, runs on | |
UDP, has full unicode support, and I dunno... washes your car? | |
Someone out there needs a pet project. How about this challenge: | |
Write up the docs! | |
Seriously! As the first step to help EVERYONE else, take a tour of | |
search engine results, the links up above, and put together a mini | |
RFC-like doc on implementation. Share it around and lets see how | |
many new talk developments we can get this summer. The summer of | |
talk! | |
Talk Talk! |