= Hacker's Guide to irker =

== Design philosopy ==

Points to you if some of this seems familiar from GPSD...

=== Keep mechanism and policy separate ===

Mechanism goes in irkerd.  Policy goes in irkerhook.py

irkerd is intended to be super-simple and completely indifferent to
what content passes through it.  It doesn't know, in any sense, that
the use-case it was designed for is broadcasting notifications from
version control systems. irkerhook.py is the part that knows about how
to mine data from repositories and sets the format of notifications.

=== If you think the mechanism needs an option, think again ===

Because irkerhook.py does policy, it takes policy options. Because
irkerd is pure mechanism, it shouldn't need any.  If you think it
does, you have almost certainly got a bug in your thinking.  Fix
that before you modify code.

=== Never configure what you can autoconfigure ===

Human attention is more expensive than machine time.  Humans are
careless and failure-prone.  Therefore, whenever you make a user tell
your code something the code can deduce for itself, you are
introducing unnecessary inefficiency and unnecessary failure modes.

This, in particular, is why irkerhook.py doesn't have a repository
type switch. It can deduce the repo type by looking, so it should.

== Release procedure ==

1. Check for merge requests at https://gitorious.org/irker

2. Do 'make pylint' to audit the code.

3. Run irk with a sample message; look at #irker on freenode to verify.

4. Bump the version numbers in irkerd and irkerhook.py

5. Update the NEWS file

6. git commit -a

7. make release

== Thanks where due == 

Alexander van Gessel (AI0867) <ai0867@gmail.com> contributed the
Subversion support in irkerhook.py. Since the 1.0 release he has 
kept as close an eye on the code as the author and has fixed at least
as many bugs.

W. Trevor King <wking@tremily.us> added SSL/TLS support and did
significant refactoring work.

Daniel Franke <dfoxfranke@gmail.com> performed a security audit of irkerd.

Georg Brandl <georg@python.org> contributed the Mercurial support in
irkerhook.py and explained how to make Control-C work right.

Laurent Bachelier <laurent@bachelier.name> fixed the Makefile so it 
wouldn't break stuff and wrote the first version of the external 
filtering option.

dak180 (name withheld by request) wrote the OS X launchd plist.

Wulf C. Krueger <philantrop@exherbo.org> wrote the systemd 
installation support.

Other people on the freenode #irker channel (Kingpin, fpcfan,
shadowm, Rick) smoked out bugs in irkerd before they could seriously
bug anybody.

