Limnoria/docs/CAPABILITIES

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.

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.

If that was all, well, the capability system would be "cool", but not many people would say it was "awesome".  But it *is* awesome!  Several things are happening behind the scene that make it awesome, and these are things that couldn't happen if the bot was using numeric userlevels or single-character flags.  First, whenever a user issues the bot a command, the command dispatcher checks to make sure the user doesn't have the "anticapability" for that command.  An anticapability is a capability that, instead of saying "what a user can do", says what a user *cannot* do.  It's formed rather simply by adding an exclamation point ("!") to the beginning of a capability; "rot13" is a capability, and "!rot13" is an anticapability.  Anyway, when a user issues the bot a command, perhaps "calc" or "help", the bot first checks to make sure the user doesn't have the "!calc" or the "!help" capabilities before even considering responding to the user.  So commands can be turned on or off on a *per user* basis, offering finegrained control not often (if at all!) seen in other bots.

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.

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.

From an end-user perspective, capabilities remove a lot of the mystery and esotery of bot control, in addition to giving the user absolutely finegrained control over what users are allowed to do with the bot.  Additionally, defaults can be set by the end-user for both individual channels and for the bot as a whole, letting an end-user set the policy he wants the bot to follow for users that haven't yet registered in his user database.

It's really a revolution!