= Hacker's Guide to irker = == Design philosopy == Points to you if some of this seems familiar from GPSD... === Keep mechanism and policy separate === Mechanism goes in irkerd. Policy goes in irkerhook.py irkerd is intended to be super-simple and completely indifferent to what content passes through it. It doesn't know, in any sense, that the use-case it was designed for is broadcasting notifications from version control systems. irkerhook.py is the part that knows about how to mine data from repositories and sets the format of notifications. === If you think the mechanism needs an option, think again === Because irkerhook.py does policy, it takes policy options. Because irkerd is pure mechanism, it shouldn't need any. If you think it does, you have almost certainly got a bug in your thinking. Fix that before you modify code. === Never configure what you can autoconfigure === Human attention is more expensive than machine time. Humans are careless and failure-prone. Therefore, whenever you make a user tell your code something the code can deduce for itself, you are introducing unnecessary inefficiency and unnecessary failure modes. This, in particular, is why irkerhook.py doesn't have a repository type switch. It can deduce the repo type by looking, so it should. == Release procedure == 1. Check for merge requests at the repository. 2. Do 'make pylint' to audit the code. 3. Run irk with a sample message; look at #irker on freenode to verify. 4. Bump the version numbers in irkerd and irkerhook.py 5. Run irkerhook.py -n and verify that the output looks sane. 6. Update the NEWS file 7. git commit -a 8. make release == Thanks where due == Alexander van Gessel (AI0867) contributed the Subversion support in irkerhook.py. Since the 1.0 release he has kept as close an eye on the code as the author and has fixed at least as many bugs. //W. here causes asciidoc to see this as a list entry. W Trevor King added SSL/TLS support and did significant refactoring work. Daniel Franke performed a security audit of irkerd. Georg Brandl contributed the Mercurial support in irkerhook.py and explained how to make Control-C work right. Laurent Bachelier fixed the Makefile so it wouldn't break stuff and wrote the first version of the external filtering option. dak180 (name withheld by request) wrote the OS X launchd plist. Wulf C. Krueger wrote the systemd installation support. Other people on the freenode #irker channel (Kingpin, fpcfan, shadowm, Rick) smoked out bugs in irkerd before they could seriously bug anybody.