Re: [Ant-contrib-developers] IRC Ant tasks

[Curt A. <ca...@ho...>]

On Aug 2, 2005, at 10:15 PM, Susan Potter wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I have a couple of Ant tasks to contribute to ant-contrib and I was
> wondering if I could join the team?
>
> I currently work in a work environment where IRC/Chat is very popular
> amongst the developers and we are rolling out continuous integration
> tools and processes currently.   We have found it useful to publish
> build status to chat channels, query chat channels since so many
> developers on the team check the chat channels more than email.  The
> IRC Ant tasks are modified Ant tasks that I had to write at work (the
> chat server they use isn't completely IRC compliant), so these are Ant
> tasks I rewrote for the purpose of giving to the open source
> community.
>
> The main Ant tasks are:
> * IRCAlertTask - sends notification that a build is started or has
> finished (with return code) to IRC channel
> * IRCQueryTask - queries channel audience for either build input or
> whether to start build, etc.
> And an Ant listener:
> * IRCAntListener - outputs build events to channel
>
> These Ant tasks depend on Jibble's pircbot Java IRC library, which
> AFAIK is available under GPL.
>
> Let me know what the procedure is for contributing code to this  
> project.
>
> Thanks,
> Susan


The mechanical aspect of contributing code to the project is to  
ensure that you have the rights to donate it and to attach it to an  
enhancement bug report.     However, it is probably best to discuss  
your proposal before submitting the code.

Have you discussed donating this code anywhere else?  If so, please  
provide links to those discussions.   Other new "homes" for the code  
could be Ant, the continuous integration server of your choice or  
pircbot.

The IRCAlertTask seems to be similar in concept to the Jabber  
publisher in CruiseControl (http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/main/ 
configxml.html#jabber).  Jabber servers can be configured to route  
messages to IRC based on my reading.

IRCQueryTask seems to be conceptually similar to the telnet task in  
Ant (http://ant.apache.org/manual/index.html).  Though I have no idea  
how widely used it is.  I would think that using information  
collected from an IRC chat to affect a build would be a bad thing,  
since it would leave no record in the CVS/SVN to reproduce the  
build.  If you were only trying to provide an IRC method to trigger a  
build, that would seem to fit the Source Control plugin role in  
CruiseControl.

pircbot doesn't seem community driven, didn't find a CVS/SVN or a  
mailing list link its website.

There is a Java Specification Request (http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/ 
detail?id=187) for Instant Messaging which intends to provide a  
common API for multiple IM protocols (however I didn't see IRC  
mentioned).  If something like this were ratified, I could envision  
the Ant group picking up a task based on it, but I doubt that  
anything as narrow as the current tasks being picked up.