Changed a typo and updated a slight misrepresentation.

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Jeremy Fincher 2003-03-25 07:50:04 +00:00
parent 2e00779d79
commit a4cf067117

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@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
Ok, some some explanation of the capabilities system is probably in order.
With most IRC bots (including the ones I've written myself prior to this one) "what a user can do" is set in one of two ways. On the *really* simple bots, each user has a numeric "level" and commands check to see if a user has a "high enough level" to perform some operation. On bots that are slightly more complicated, users have a list of "flags" whose meanings are hardcoded, and the bot checks to see if a user possesses the necessary flag before performing some operation. Both methods, IMO, are rather arbitrary, and force the user and the programmer to be unduly comfined to less expressive constructs.
With most IRC bots (including the ones I've written myself prior to this one) "what a user can do" is set in one of two ways. On the *really* simple bots, each user has a numeric "level" and commands check to see if a user has a "high enough level" to perform some operation. On bots that are slightly more complicated, users have a list of "flags" whose meanings are hardcoded, and the bot checks to see if a user possesses the necessary flag before performing some operation. Both methods, IMO, are rather arbitrary, and force the user and the programmer to be unduly confined to less expressive constructs.
This bot is different. Every user has a set of "capabilities" that is consulted every time they give the bot a command. Commands, rather than checking for a user level of 100, or checking if the user has an "o" flag, are instead able to check if a user has the "owner" capability. At this point such a difference might not seem revolutionary, but at least we can already tell that this method is self-documenting, and easier for users and developers to understand what's truly going on.
@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ If that was all, well, the capability system would be "cool", but not many peopl
But that's not all! The capabilities system also supports *Channel* capabilities, which are capabilities that only apply to a specific channel; they're of the form "#channel.capability". Whenever a user issues a command to the bot in a channel, the command dispatcher also checks to make sure the user doesn't have the anticapability for that command *in that channel*, and if the user does, the bot won't respond to the user in the channel. Thus now, in addition to having the ability to turn individual commands on or off for an individual user, we can now turn commands on or off for an individual user on an individual channel!
So when a user "foo" sends a command "bar" to the bot on channel "#baz", first the bot checks to see if the user has the anticapability for the command by itself, "!bar". If so, it returns right then and there, compltely ignoring the fact that the user issued that command to it. If the user doesn't have that anticapability, then the bot checks to see if the user issued the command over a channel, and if so, checks to see if the user has the antichannelcapability for that command, "#baz.!bar". If so, it sets a flag that reminds it later on to respond to the user privately, rather than on the channel itself. If neither of these anticapabilities are present, then the bot just responds to the user like normal.
So when a user "foo" sends a command "bar" to the bot on channel "#baz", first the bot checks to see if the user has the anticapability for the command by itself, "!bar". If so, it returns right then and there, compltely ignoring the fact that the user issued that command to it. If the user doesn't have that anticapability, then the bot checks to see if the user issued the command over a channel, and if so, checks to see if the user has the antichannelcapability for that command, "#baz.!bar". If so, again, he returns right then and there and doesn't even think about responding to the bot. If neither of these anticapabilities are present, then the bot just responds to the user like normal.
From a programmatical perspective, capabilties are easy to use and flexible. Any command can check if a user has any capability, even ones not thought of when the bot was originally written. Commands/Callbacks can add their own capabilities -- it's as easy as just checking for a capability and documenting somewhere that a user needs that capability to do something.