minimise number of IRC bots

[sa2ajj]

We currently have a number of bots:

bb-trac

notifies about ​trac events (something @verm did)

bb-meta

notifies about ​Meta Buildbot events (IRC status change)

bb-9-meta

notifies about Meta Buildbot events as implemented by the latest and greatest Buildbot

bb-github

provided by ​http://github.com, notifies about interesting events happening at ​http://github.com/buildbot/buildbot

The *proposal* is to have a super bot -- a Supybot based bb-bot:

• listens to RSS feed for meta buildbot
• listens to RSS feed for 9-meta buildbot
• listens to RSS feed for Trac (if a proper feed can be provided with all necessary information: new tickets, updated tickets)
• MeetBot plugin enabled

And, at least, have factoids database plugged in.

@verm mentioned that Supybot is a bit less than perfect, though no details were provided.

This ticket is to collect all relevant information and decide if we could go forward with the bb-bot.

[sa2ajj]

forgot to add the CC...

[sa2ajj]

@verm, you mentioned on IRC that Supybot has issues.

Let's have them written down in this ticket so in future we all do not have to wonder what they are...

[sa2ajj]

A few features that are not mentioned above:

• IRC channel logging (#2853)
• ability to use s/something/fixed anything/

[dustin]

We had some conversation on-channel about this.

The instant feedback from trac, github, and so on is really helpful -- I wouldn't want to wait for a "reasonable" polling interval to find out, for example, that all of the builds I just pushed had failed, or that a pull request had been updated. So you'd need something in the bot to be receiving pushed notifications from github, trac, and buildbot.

That seems like a lot of hacking just for the benefit of having a single bot in channel.

[verm]

The other issue with having a single bot is when it dies everything dies. It ends up being just as much work to maintain a single bot as a gateway as it is to run individual bots. Also, you end up hacking the 'front-end' bot over time to support individual needs for the services behind it.

I don't think there is any benefit to having a single bot. bb-trac is a gateway that listens on the local network and simply redirects messages sent to it. We can rename it to bb-bot and prepend messages with [trac]. Anything else within the network that needs to chat to IRC can use the gateway. The change is simple if it's useful.