desbot

This is a small IRC bot for Haskell evaluation, along the lines of lambdabot. In #learnprogramming, we continually have people new to programming and IRC in the channel. A lot of newbies think IRC is Twitter, and direct a message at someone using the syntax @nick rather than the conventional nick: or nick,. Prefixing a line with @ will trigger lambdabot.

<newbie> Hello, I have X problem
<veteran> newbie: could you paste the code somewhere
<newbie> @veteran sure!
<lambdabot> Unknown command, try @list

The ratio of instances of lambdabot being useful in a non-Haskell-focused channel to instances of confusing newbies was enough that I decided to write this program.

Installation

You need to install stack first.

$ git clone https://github.com/pharpend/desbot.git
$ cd desbot
$ stack setup
$ stack install

That will take a long time, so go get some coffee or something. You need to do some setup before running desbot.

First, generate the needed configuration file and paths:

$ desbot scaffold

Follow the instructions given. You should then be ready to go!

$ desbot run

Usage

To use desbot on the network, you can either target it in a channel, or send it a private message.

• In a channel, you need to prefix your command with desbot: or desbot, :

  <nick> desbot: 1 + 1
  <desbot> nick: 2
  

• In a private message, don't do that

  <nick> 1 + 1
  <desbot> 2
  

Things to do

I'm too lazy to open a new GitHub issue for each of these.

• Desbot needs to display type information when queried with :t or :type

• Desbot needs to display kind information when queried with :k or :kind

• Desbot needs to link to its source code when given :src or :source.

• Desbot needs to respond to CTCP SOURCE.

• Desbot needs to display its version when given :version.

• I need to clean up the mueval code so that it can be used as a proper library, rather than just running spawnCommand. I have a fork called "nueval", which can be found here: https://github.com/pharpend/nueval.

• I need to come up with a better name than "nueval", because it's too close to "mueval", and not nearly as clever as I thought it would be.

• Desbot needs to have some sort of daemon/client mode, so I can have it reload its configuration on-the-fly.

• Desbot needs to respond to desbot: help or desbot: manual. This can be done easily by adding a function called help and putting it in a loadfile for mueval.

• Desbot needs to run in some sort of security container, like nsjail. This is to prevent intrusion on the off chance someone manages to find a security hole. mueval does an excellent job of sandboxing, but there are still probably holes.

  Right now, desbot is running on a server running Ubuntu 14.04, which has AppArmor. Once I can arrange it, I will probably move it to a Linux server running SELinux and grsecuity, or a server running OpenBSD, which will further enhance its security.

• Desbot needs to be startable with systemd and/or upstart and/or BSD init. This will be much more easily solvable once my mueval fork is complete, and we can bundle it as a library rather than depending on the mueval binary.

Contact

• Bugs and/or questions should be reported in the GitHub bug tracker.
• You can email me at [email protected] or pharpend on FreeNode.net.