IRC Services for the ASF

Introduction

ASFBot on the Freenode network offers many services for Apache projects on IRC. Generally, to enable these services, you will need to contact Infrastructure, either via a JIRA ticket or via #asfinfra on HipChat.

Subversion, Git and JIRA reporting

ASFBot can report on new commits to your Subversion or Git repository - similar to the old CIA services - or report when a JIRA ticket was created, updated, closed etc. These reports can be tailored to your individual needs; multiline logs, compacted paragraphs, coloring, different report styles etc.

You can subscribe to any repository you like, and get reports on any specific changes you prefer, as long as these changes are publicly available.

Subscriptions are tag-based, meaning that any one tag will apply to f.x. both Subversion and git commits.

Latest JIRA change

If your channel is set up for JIRA reporting, ASFBot will keep track of the latest changes to a JIRA ticket. To view, for instance, the last comment pertaining to an issue, simply type: ASFBot: comment [ticket] where ticket could be fx. INFRA-1234.

Issue information fetching

ASFBot can assist people in finding the correct information or link regarding specific JIRA or Bugzilla issues. To use this feature, simply type f.x. "issue #52230" to get a link for the Bugzilla issue no. 52230 and a quick summary of the issue. Or you could type "COUCHDB-1234" to get a link to that specific JIRA ticket. Please note that issue summaries are only available for Bugzilla at the moment.

Secretary feature

ASFBot provides a simple secretary feature for all to use. To leave a message for an absent person, simply write: ASFBot: tell [recipient] [message], and that message will be passed on the next time that person logs onto the channel.

Record keeping for meetings

ASFBot can keep a record of meetings done on IRC and publish these in HTML format with an agenda, actions to be taken and members present.

Record keeping is only allowed in channels where logging is enabled. To enable logging, please contact the infrastructure team, either via a JIRA ticket or on #asfinfra.

Record keeping works as follows:

  • To initiate a meeting, type "ASFBot: meeting start".
  • To set an agenda, either type "#topic [agenda goes here]" or use the /topic command to change the channel's topic. ASFBot will keep the original topic of the channel in memory, and change it back once the meeting is over.
  • To add an information to the meeting summary, type "#info [something here]".
  • To add an action to be taken before the next meeting, type "#action [action]".
  • To end a meeting and save a summary of it, type "ASFBot: meeting end". This will end the record keeping and produce an HTML document containing the summary of the meeting as well as a log of everything that was said.
  • To send an IRC meeting summary as an email to a recipient, type "ASFBot: meeting send your@domain.tld". You will need to have been granted karma by infrastructure to perform this task.

Anything said with [off] at the beginning will be considered off-the-record and will not be written in the meeting log. In most regards, ASFBot will understand the meetbot commands, and as such, #meetingstart or #meetingend will also start or end a recording of a meeting.

For an example of what a meeting summary may look like, check out this CouchDB meeting

Integration with comments.apache.org

ASFBot can relay comments provided via comments.apache.org to your IRC channel. If you have set up a karma list with Infrastructure, you can also reply to comments via IRC.