Most of you are aware that I run firebot, and that he’s been around, a relatively long time now, where long is since around the Firefox 0.9 launch (June 6th? maybe, can’t really remember, and the launch was the 14th.) in 2004. Starting as a bug-reporting bot, I eventually changed him to running mozbot, the Mozilla IRC bot software. Mozbot, surprisingly enough, was released by Netscape developers on 10/16/1998, with Mozbot2, (oopsbot) on 4/23/2001, and was actively maintained by Hixie for several years after, until he moved on to more time-consuming things sometime in 2005. The last major version was Mozbot 2.4, released in 2002. As fate would have it, I ended up running the mozbot on irc.mozilla.org after awhile, picking up from mozbot and more recently, botbot, after mozillazine stopped hosting one. Its gone from a tiny single-channel thing to being in around 3 dozen, and he even has a fan blog. Though, without an active maintainer, getting patches that were hiding inside firebot’s dusty innards into the source tree was pretty much impossible, aside from the bugzilla module, which the bugzilla team graciously supported.
So, perhaps out of stupidity, or maybe not, I sort’ve jokingly inquired about taking over ownership of the code officially, and as age-old mozilla policy would have it, you ask for it, you own it. (Log is here, including the part where Hixie came out of 179 hours of idleness to give it away, search for mozbot (21:04 or so)). Though I think mozbot ownership comes with it the curse of becoming suddenly busy with other things, as for the first 6 weeks, I had pretty much no time to devote to it, college courses being the time consuming beasts that they are, but since finally getting started on Novermber 6th, the following 23 (!) bugs have been fixed in mozbot:
With 6 more being resolved as Invalid, Duplicate or Worksforme. Which, considering how few changes have occured in the last while, feels like amazing work. Most of them are old patches that have been languishing in bugzilla, waiting for reviews for, in some cases several years, So I’d like to thank everybody who’s submitted a patch, even if it has taken forever to get it landed, for their work.
Oh, and for those who run a mozbot (all few of you…) and who use the !seen functionality, i’d like to draw your attention to Bug 131321/341484, which factored out the !seen functionality into a new module, Seen.bm, so be sure to load it, once you update to tip, so things keep working.
