Running

You need a bot.toml file that follows the format as specified by the irc crate. Compile with the usual rustup (to install Rust and friends) and cargo (to actually do the building) commands. Generally aiming for whatever is the latest version of Rust.

Things I was required to install with apt on a fresh Lubuntu installation:

• build-essential
• pkg-config for openssl-sys crate
• libssl-dev for openssl-sys crate

On Arch: pacman -S openssl gcc pkgconf though the last two would already be installed if you installed the base-devel group.

OpenSSL 3

Arch was already ahead of Debian in openssl versions. Notably, openssl 3 removed support for the encryption I had used on debian to have an SASL key. Got an error:

[2022-11-20T12:39:12Z INFO  irc::client::conn] Connecting via TLS to irc.libera.chat.
Error: Tls(Normal(ErrorStack([Error { code: 50856204, library: "digital envelope routines", function: "inner_evp_generic_fetch", reason: "unsupported", file: "crypto/evp/evp_fetch.c", line: 373, data: "Global default library context, Algorithm (RC2-40-CBC : 0), Properties ()" }])))

Resolved it by following https://stackoverflow.com/a/72600724/411495.

openssl pkcs12 -in cert/keyStore.p12 -nodes -legacy >temp
openssl pkcs12 -in ./temp -export -out cert/keyStore.openssl3.p12

Maintenance

Follow some best practices to keep the code clean:

• Run cargo fmt on the code. Ensure it is installed by issuing rustup component add rustfmt-preview (at the time of writing).
• Run cargo clippy on the code. Ensure it is installed by issuing rustup component add clippy (at the time of writing).
• Run cargo outdated to check for outdated dependencies. See https://github.com/kbknapp/cargo-outdated. Currently install is via cargo install cargo-outdated.
• Run cargo test.

To Do/Ideas

• Basic query parsing should probably be centralised, always the same idea.
• Related to that, an alias plugin sounds useful (see also the growing mess in games shortshortcut parsing)
• plugins.toml should let you decide which plugins to enable.
• Need to filter out a bunch of lesser competitions that nobody cares about.
  • Have an include and exclude list
  • Option to exclude all and only allow explicit includes?
  • Have the list be a configuration, not hardcoded
  • Have an --all or similar option when you do want to look through everything

From Old Gitea Issues

• Add weather via merrysky / its backend api
• Match random strava club links? Not sure I really want that, giving the leaderboard doesn't help anyone. Maybe just name / type / location / member count. Does not occur often enough to matter though.
• Consistent logging. Use the log (I think) crate everywhere instead of println.
• FIFA and Elo ranking for a country (see !elo club command)
• Fantasy Premier League ranking.
• Does it make sense to maybe use a lexer or whatever to analyse user input vs adhoc regex?
• Better error messages for !calc. Help with conversions / unit names would be handy too.
• Anti spam. See if the IRC library offers anything here. Maybe combine with more streamlined parsing of the input. But would every plugin then need to "register" its catches? Not sure how to best go about that.
• If anti spam works, then see about making the bot reply in private messages.
• Can this be easily turned into a bot for other platforms? Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, idk, something else to make it useful for me.
• Recent IRC activity check for !strava command? Meaning if people don't talk in the channel, then don't show them in the ranking. Combine !seen information with the strava-ircnick connections we have.
• Also enable showing last week's strava ranking. Useful the x hours after the clock changes.
• Some games incorrectly show up as @live games in !game. Status: Aband., AAW, AHW (awarded home/away win). Hard to test those last two, the first one might appear somewhat regularly.
• Consider a !strava me (or !strava someperson) option that shows the stats for a person and their ranking for each.