Bug#771403: ITP: willie -- simple, lightweight, open source, easy-to-use IRC utility bot

[Antoine Beaupré <anarcat@debian.org>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: "Antoine Beaupré" <anarcat@debian.org>

* Package name    : willie
  Version         : 4.5.1
  Upstream Author : Michael Yanovich, Edward Powell, Elad Alfassa...
* URL             : https://github.com/embolalia/willie
* License         : EFLv2
  Programming Lang: Python
  Description     : simple, lightweight, open source, easy-to-use IRC utility bot

Upstream description:

Willie is a simple, lightweight, open source, easy-to-use IRC utility
bot, written in Python. It's designed to be easy to use, easy to run,
and easy to make new features for.

Willie comes with a ton of ready-made features for you to use. It can
leave notes for people, give you reminders, check RSS feeds, and much
more.

Willie also comes with a fully-documented and easy-to-use API, so you
can write your own features. There's also an easy tutorial you can
follow along with, to help you learn.

Developing for Willie is a great way to familiarize yourself with
Python. It's easy to start, but there's no limit to the cool things
you can do with it.


I find the software interesting because it is a modern, elegantly
designed yet minimal Python-based IRC bot. It compares favorably to
the already packaged supybot:

https://github.com/embolalia/willie/wiki/Comparison-to-other-bots

I would be happy to have co-maintainers and I am unlikely to work on
this in the very short term, but I will probably get around to work on
this for $WORK eventually anyways, so this is an ITP.

Note that Willie is a derivative of Phenny, which itself is a
derivative of Jenni (or something like that).

There are some optional Python dependencies for this bot, some of
which are not packaged in Debian:

https://github.com/embolalia/willie/wiki/System-Requirements

Specifically, I couldn't find the praw package. But that's not a
blocker since it's optional and only used for reddit.

Otherwise the package seems pretty straightforward Python packaging
with a daemon, which also has a systemd service file and an easy
auto-configuration tool. The package would probably need to just
create a user to sandbox the bot and tell the admin to run the config
wizard and we'd be done with this package.