[dcc2] Hi all :)

[Jesse McGrew]

Szymon Stefanek wrote:

>On Tuesday 10 February 2004 04:59, Dan Smith wrote:
>  
>
...

>>This may be a better approach if, aside from the DCC2 ctcp message, we wish
>>to also create a historic DCC backward compatibility.  Jesse suggested (for
>>historic dcc send and chat requests) we can append all the DCC2 tokens
>>after the command, and if the client supports DCC2 then negotiation could
>>take place with DCC2 ACCEPT.  If not, then we would follow the historic
>>procedure for connection.  This would mean our clients would support both
>>the new DCC2 and historic dcc with a DCC2 compatibility layer.
>>    
>>
>
>I think that this could work, but it requires several additional efforts from the programmer.
>It would also require experimenting with the old clients to verify that most of them
>handle correctly the messages with trailing "garbage". KVIrc, for example, would handle
>the messages but warn the user about the additional data in the request.
>  
>
I realize it takes extra effort to make DCC2 compatible with older 
clients, but keep in mind that when DCC2 is introduced and for some time 
after, nearly everyone will be using older clients. Users don't upgrade 
immediately, and DCC2-savvy clients for different platforms won't all 
come out at the same time.

Many users will be frustrated if file transfers to their friends stop 
working after an upgrade. It makes sense to have new CTCP messages for 
DCC2, but the old ones should still be used as much as possible for 
compatibility with old clients, at least until DCC2 is adopted by most 
users.

Jesse