ETA-NG - IRC Interface

IRC Interface to ETA system. IRC is one of the many avenue requests are made of one W3C team member of another in addition to a major means of overall communication. Sometimes immediate resolution is not possible or the party needed to resolve the issue is not identified or unavailable. The purpose of this interface is to allow an issue to be created/closed etc. readily without having to switch to ETA's web ui or mailing request to a list.

Bugger, the default configurable name for the eta irc bot, was designed to have a concept of discussions with individuals - strictly with one individual per discussion. It is meant to be able to be in multiple discussions with different individuals on the same or different irc channels. Most discussions are brief and can consist of one line from user and one or more line response from eta irc bot often with appropriate uri for that issue in ETA web ui.

Ideally discussions can involve mutliple parties or allowing a party to be within several discussions simultaneous, but keeping track of what is meant for which discussion would require additional text from the user to identify which conversation they are contributing to with each transmission due to irc's nature. Once in a discussion with the irc bot all communication from that party on that channel that initiated the discussion is evaluated and considered pertinent to the discussion if decipherable. Some commands besides eod (End Of Discussion) bring about the immediate and logical conclusion to a discussion.

The irc bot runs as a servlet, living indefinitely, loaded and intialized with the underlying resources within the application server available to it. Ideally the servlet engine is set to start it and ApplicationRunner when it gets started. Both can be manually started within a browser if needed and the bot can be restarted should it ping out - it may later be checked and restarted by a background scheduler should it meet an untimely demise. Config file is not rechecked as it restarts as that information is already cached by ApplicationRunner. http://hostname:8001/servlet/org.w3c.eta.servlet.BuggerServlet if installed by default Jigsaw 2.1.1 install and default eta-ng install /usr/local/eta/lib/org is symlinked into /usr/local/Jigsaw/Jigsaw/WWW/servlet BuggerServlet will also start the underlying ApplicationManager regardless of whether or not http://hostname:8001/servlet/org.w3c.app.servlet.ApplicationRunner is started, which merely is a means to initialize it for the server and provide statistics and information. BuggerServlet will also give some information and statistics to valid ETA users.