The Firebot Blog

In my last blog post about the bots, I mentioned combining them into one bot. Well, as of a few days ago, this is now done. So I thought I’d blog a follow-up post about it, before moving on to more interesting things. It wasn’t exactly easy because of my inexperience with perl, but the new firebot seems to work decently.
If anybody wants the BotModule they can grab bzbot.bm here… Its pretty rough in places, but it works.
In addition to adding the new module, I also applied the patch from Bug 248450 to give firebot SSL support, and made him set his unmode +B so the server knows he’s a bot. His /whois can’t get much longer. heh.
Lastly, anybody looking for /just/ the Firefox/Tbird, etc Bug Info, and don’t want to be in #firefox/#thunderbird and get confused with all the support,etc discussion. Feel free to join #firebot (formerly #wolfbot).

Well, irc.mozilla.org now has services, thanks to the work of Stuart.
I’m not particularly a IRC services champion, but so far, it appears that with little effort on my part, the status quo is maintained and I don’t have to change any behavior on my part. (register nick, register channel, add identify command to chatzilla on startup.)
The bots were another matter though, wolfbot got a new module enabled (ServicesLogin) which works nicely with a single command to configure. Firebot, on the other hand, needed new code so he’d /msg nickserv on startup.
Though, now that firebot/wolfbot aren’t needed for channel op help anymore (firebot helped out with keeping docbot +o’ed, and wolfbot did similarly to firebot in other places), I’m wondering about the practicality of keeping 2 bots running 24/7. Firebot’s primary goal is Bug status announcements (for #firefox, #thunderbird and #wolfbot.), and wolfbot’s is informational, RDF announcements in #spreadfirefox, tinderbox in #firefox/#thunderbird, bugzilla in #wolfbot, etc. Neither goal requires a fully dedicated bot, so I’m thinking about merging the two bots into one. They’d be more manageable, and less channel clutter. Most likely, that’d require porting firebot to be a mozbot module, bzbot.bm, and then enabling that in wolfbot (which i’d rename firebot.). I’m sure there’ll be some major reason why this won’t work, but its worth a shot.

I’ve made a few changes to firebot, the IRC bot that gives bugzilla bug information for Devs/QA/users in #firefox and #thunderbird tonight.
* Added kick handling, auto-rejoins channel when kicked.
* Added invite handling, bot can join a channel when invited.
* Added ping to test if hte bot is alive. just say firebot: ping
* Added per-channel op lists. in addition to the global list, so
* cleaned up a few hacks I threw into an otherwise clean codebase, restoring channel op speed to original.
* Attempt #2 to fix the ping-out and never reconnect bug.
Still to do, is to fix the milestone status reports to be cross-product and available in a /msg instead of in channel, then they can be enabled again.