Infobot 0.49.0

[Kevin Lenzo <lenzo@cs.cmu.edu>]

Hi folks,                    1999-Dec-22

I put a horribly underdocumented development version 
of the infobot up at 

   http://www.infobot.org/src/dev/

It's version 0.49.0, the odd-numbered minor predecessor
to 0.50.0. I expect we'll use the 0.5 series up and
then go to 1.0.

While I've stubbed out perldoc for most things, 
it is really just that -- stubs -- for the most
part.  That will all have to be fleshed out.

The bot doesn't do IRC right now, nor remote 
access of any kind.  It only does Console and Raw.

  tar zxvf Infobot-0.49.tar.gz
  cd Infobot-0.49
  perl Makefile.PL
  make
  make test

If something fails there, let me know! It should be
ok with the modules, etc.

You can either install system wide with make dist,
or just work with it here.

  perl -MInfobot -e shell
or
  perl -MInfobot -e 'shell(verbosity=>10)'

should get you a shell.  Note: It will be much prettier
if you have Term::ANSIColor.pm. You see here that you
can also pass arguments to shell, which it passes
on to Infobot::new().  Any parameter can be passed 
here for initialization.  The default verbosity is 
much lower (3).

You can also do

  perl -MInfobot -e raw
or
  perl -MInfobot -e 'raw("filename")'

which is a glitz-free interface.  one line in, reply out.
no color, no flash.  Good for use under a pipe. If
it's given a file name, it will operate on the file, otherwise
uses STDIN.

  perl -MInfobot -e raw_quote
or
  perl -MInfobot -e 'raw_quote("filename")'

quotes each input line as for mail quoting to STDOUT.  Same
file dealy.

An executable named

  infobot

should be on your system; it's a very simple invocation
of the basic setup.

THINGS YOU CAN DO

try

   par
or 
   parameters

which should give you all the current settings at
the bot level.

   modules

will list out the active modules.  + means active,
- means inactive.  

   set Zippy off

will turn Zippy off, and

   set Zippy on

well, you get the idea.

   set par verbosity 10
or
   set bot verbosity 10

will set the BOT's verbosity. thus 

   set <modulename> <parameter> <value>

will affect a module, whereas

   set bot <parameter> <value> 

will affect the bot's params.

One interesting thing to do is

   set bot forking 1

(the default is forking 0).

The bot should be able to do x is y kinda
stuff, plus everything in the modules. 

Note: Not All Modules have been Ported.
Unported modules are not in this release; 
a couple more days.

I apologize for the disarray.  I hope to
get more of the communication up soon
so that these bots will be on the net soon,
but i wanted to get the basic console, module,
module loader, and structure out to you.

Infobot::Entity and Infobot::Entity::Dispatcher
are the base classes of everything, and
Infobot::Entity::Dispatcher is just an 
Infobot::Entity that can send and receiver (remote)
messages.

kevin
lenzo@cs.cmu.edu