Ed,
I think you might have misunderstood Yuvi's first response.
and possibly a less reliable IRC bridge
running on labs.
I believe he meant that, rather than shutting down the IRC feed entirely, we'd write a bridge between RCStream and an IRC server so that laggards who insist on using IRC don't see their tools go down. But that bridge will inevitably be less stable than RCStream -- which using common/standard formats (JSON) on top of a standard protocol (websockets).
Really, RCStream is what the IRC feed ought to have been -- and probably would have been if those standards were available at the time of its construction. RCStream solves the same problem better.
-Aaron