CIA hook for contrib/
From: Eric Raymond <hidden>
Date: 2016-06-15 22:48:30
Summary: * The CIA hooks for git are presently dusty and somewhat broken. * I am requesting that they be given a home in git contrib/. * I am supplying working, updated versions. * I will accept maintainance responsibility if required. Many listmembers will be aware of CIA.vc, a useful service that echoes commits from open-source projects to IRC channels and maintains various interesting statistics on commit activity. Under git, it is supported by one of two hook scripts: ciabot.pl and ciabot.pl. In the course of migrating the GPSD project from Subversion to git, I discovered that the 2006 version of ciabot.sh available from CIA.vc is broken. It requires, but does not have, a PATH adjustment to cope with the fact that various git tools it uses now go in a commands directory private to git. The 2008 version of ciabot.sh made available on the git wiki also has no PATH adjustment. Upon investigating further, I find that ciabot.sh seems to be a derivative of ciabot.pl, which is a dangling bit of the moribund Cogito project. I have been unable to get responses from the authors of either ciabot.sh or ciabot.pl. A fixed and working version in shell is enclosed. It has some advantages over the 2006 and 2008 versions: * It uses only POSIX features. Thus, it will work with Debian/Ubuntu dash and BSD's non-bash shells. * It's faster, because it uses a lighter-weight shell. * It's much closer to being autoconfiguring. In the normal case, all the person installing an instance need supply is the project name. * It is considerably better documented. * It can support cgit as well as gitweb installations. I am also enclosing a rewrite in Python. This has a serious functional advantage over either Perl or sh; the batteries-included effect of the Python libraries means it's not dependent on things like the path location of sendmail or whether the hosting site will allow it to run wget. I think the broad usage of CIA.vc justifies adding one of these as an official ciabot hook to git contrib/, and am so proposing. Should it be required, I will accept maintainance responsibility; I expect the amount of effort involved to be minimal. Both versions have been live-tested on the GPSD project repo. The Python version is now in production use there. Code is enclosed. -- <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>