One nice thing about rbot is certainly, to me, the fact that installing it is mostly just an emerge away. For quite a while there has been a live ebuild of rbot that fetched first from Subversion and now from GIT.
The only problem was that the ebuild fetched the sources, then made a gem, installed it, and then removed some files. Not exactly the shortest way around.
Thanks to the guys in #rbot, this has been solved. Now rbot installs itself without using gems, but by simple setup.rb. This means not only that you won’t need rake and zip to install it, but also that the installed files have decent path, rather than being buried inside the rubygems directories.
An additional advantage comes from the size of the installed files; when you install a gem, a copy of the sources is left in the rubygems tree; this can be quite a waste. The size of the rbot binpkg has halved:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 959426 May 24 12:08 /usr/portage-packages/All/rbot-9999-r8.tbz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 425034 Jun 23 20:18 /usr/portage-packages/All/rbot-9999-r9.tbz2
Add to this that the ruby-gettext dependency is gone too, now you got a nls USE flag that allows you to choose whether you want localised bots or not, and if you don’t want them, it won’t ask you for ruby-gettext at all. Nice, uh?
But it’s not finished here. I was hacking at the ebuild today for a different reason. rbot has a figlet plugin, that executes the figlet command and copy the output on IRC. The ebuild, though, didn’t have an option to pull in figlet, and I wanted to fix that.
So together with the removal of rubygems dependency, the new ebuild also has USE flags to enable the figlet, cal, host and fortune plugins. So you either get your dependencies pulled in, or the bot has the plugins disabled out of the ebuild. Cool!
And talking about the fortune plugin, listing the categories didn’t work on Gentoo, as we install the database in a different directory than rbot expected them to be. This is fixed in rbot upstream repository by yours truly.
Always a pleasure to fix rbot on Gentoo 😉 Kudos welcome as well as bribes.
