debian-devel-changes IRC bot

Requirements:

• Python >= 2.4
• Beautiful Soup (python-beautifulsoup)
• Supybot
• Local MTA
• lockfile-progs
• python-btsutils

Installation

• Obtain a copy of the bot sources and place in an empty directory. We will refer to this dir as $SOURCE_DIR.

• Ensure that

  • $SOURCE_DIR/bin/ is writable by the supybot user (so that it can create a FIFO)
  • $SOURCE_DIR/bin/lockfile/ is writable by your MTA

• Create an email address which outputs mail directed to it to the STDIN of $SOURCE_DIR/bin/debian-devel-changes-bot.sh. Under Exim you can use the "pipe" transport for this.

  You should keep this email address secret so that 3rd-parties cannot inject specially crafted messages onto the channel.

• Configure a Supybot instance using the "supybot-wizard" command. You are recommended to run this in the "bot-config" directory under $SOURCE_DIR (it will be ignored by the revision control system).

• Add "$SOURCE_DIR/plugin" to the "supybot.directories.plugins" directive in your ".conf" file.

• Run supybot $SOURCE_DIR/bot-config/.conf to start the bot.

• Call the following for every channel you wish the bot to emit change notices:

  !channel <#channel> supybot.plugins.DebianDevelChanges.show_changes True

• Subscribe the bot to the following lists:

  • http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-changes/
  • http://lists.debian.org/debian-bugs-dist/
  • http://lists.debian.org/debian-bugs-closed/
  • http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/
  • http://lists.backports.org/mailman/listinfo/backports-changes

• Configure the bot to start on bootup:

  @reboot supybot --daemon $SOURCE_DIR/bot-config/.conf

• (Optional) Disable spam checking for messages sent to the bot