I think IRC is a vastly under-rated tool. It is somthing I used a lot in the mid/late 90’s and in my first few years at University on the old DEC Workstations. Back before Skype and before the web was getting ready for its next version number, IRC was the best way to chat online.
For a long time I forgot about IRC, until it became obvious that (with a channel bot) it can be useful for all sorts of things, beyond just regular chat. With a bot parsing and watching RSS feeds, your channel can include notifications for just about anything you want, SVN commits, Trac tickets, even exceptions thrown from your code (you’ll have to build a feed for that yourself).
So I looked into setting up a channel bot myself (something I haven’t done before). Looking around I played with infobot (Perl) and eggdrop (C/TCL) – before (rather predicatably) going with RBot (Ruby) I had a little hassle getting the bot to work on Debian. It requires the Berkley Database (and Ruby’s binding to it).
Of course the BDB that comes with GNU/Debian Linux (apt-get) is out of date, and you will need to compile the most recent version instead. If you already installed Berkeley DB on your Debian Box, uninstall it to prevent conflicts. Then get it from here (./configure, make, make install). Choose BDB 4.4 or lower since the Ruby BDB bindings are not compatible with the new 4.5) – I couldn’t find all of those caveats documented together in the one place, so that may be of use to someone.
Next grab Ruby’s BDB bindings – and finally make sure you can call the bdb library in irb. If you can do,
:~$ irb
>> require 'bdb'
=> true- without throwing an error, then download and install RBot. Its fairly simple to setup and there are a large number of plugins to play around with. Rbot will install a some of these by default (including rss.rb) and you can extend them, or write your own in the bot’s local plugin directory.
To persist the bot, use a simple ‘keep alive’ script;
#!/bin/bash
proc=`ps -fu $LOGNAME | grep name_of_your_bot | grep -v grep | wc -l`
if test $proc -eq 0
then
nohup rbot /home/username/.name_of_your_bot > /dev/null &
fiAnd put it in a cron job to check its running (e.g. every 55 minutes);
# make sure rbot is running all the time
*/55 * * * * /home/username/rbotchk.shMy work in progress Rbot (kafka) is sitting in #komura on irc.perl.org – expect it to be broken most of time as I add a few plugins and try stuff out.
While there are hundreds of IRC clients available, I have stuck to using IRSSI (a terminal client) its old-fashioned (I know), but simple and I can access it from anywhere (keeping it running on a screen). I’d also recommend Colloquy a decent graphical client for OSX.
