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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!
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