[squeak-dev] irc bots review, call for consensus

Philippe Marschall philippe.marschall at gmail.com
Sat Sep 19 21:26:01 UTC 2009


2009/9/19, Simon Michael <simon at joyful.com>:
> Aloha!
>
> I'm back from vacation, and have been reviewing how the IRC bots in #squeak
> and #etoys performed. Also, now that we've
> had a chance to observe them for a few weeks, I'd like to formally poll the
> community to confirm or reject the current
> setup. I have heard mostly positive feedback but some folks think the noise
> outweighs the benefit. Just to be clear,
> this mail is about announcements on IRC, not the commit announcements on the
> mail list.
>
>
> Recap and some observations:
>
> - four bots are running in #squeak (squeaksourcebot, squeaktrunkbot,
> squeakbugsbot, squeakplanetbot) and two in #etoys
> (etoysupdatesbot, etoystrackerbot). The last two are quiet and
> uncontroversial so I'll ignore those.
>
> - the bots ran pretty well unattended. I asked several squeakers to keep an
> eye on them but no maintenance was needed.
> Mean time between failures (unexpected terminations due to loss of irc
> connection) was about one bot-day. Cron restarted
> downed bots periodically so outages hopefully weren't too noticeable. As an
> extra safeguard all bots were restarted
> nightly; this is normally not done.
>
> - the bots are generic rss/atom feed announcers, emitting at least one irc
> message per new feed item. I can tweak them
> quite a bit, but I'd prefer not to maintain special-purpose #squeak-specific
> bots.
>
> - currently, each bot can announce up to 5 new items every 15 minutes. The
> downside of reducing the max announce rate is
> increased time lag when announcing bursts of activity.
>
> - also, a single item with an unusually long squeaksource commit description
> gets split up into multiple irc messages.
> (This is rare but I'll probably change this.)
>
> - most noise comes from the commit bots: squeaktrunkbot and especially
> squeaksourcebot. squeakbugsbot once or twice
> announced 20ish items, presumably due to a genuine burst of bug-updating
> activity.
>
> - when reviewing irc logs, bot noise sometimes looks overwhelming only
> because there wasn't much human discussion going
> on. Look at the timestamps or participate in the channel in real time to get
> a better feel for it.
>
> - commit activity comes in waves, as you'd expect. Some days are quiet. We
> had a couple of very heavy days while I was
> away, probably due to ESUG. Commit activity will probably increase over
> time.
>
> - I want the bots to reflect community consensus, so I'm posting here on the
> mail list and would like to hear from as
> many as possible. I think opinions from the regular #squeak users should
> probably carry more weight than the rest.
>
>
> Poll:
>
> My question is: What should be done with the bots currently announcing in
> the #squeak IRC channel ?
>
> a. Minor tweaks only, they are basically fine where they are.
>
> b. Move them all to back to #squeak-in-depth or elsewhere, they are damaging
> #squeak!
>
> c. Move the noisy commit bots to a separate channel, keep others where they
> are.
>
> d. I have a better idea: ...
>
> Please respond (any way you like) to this mail list thread to help me know
> what to do. Please do respond even if you are
> happy with the status quo, so we get an accurate picture.

They are _really_ annoying, remove them. If I wanted to be kept up to
date about Squeak Source I'd use RSS feeds. Same goes for commit mails
btw, that's really 90ies tech.

Cheers
Philippe



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