Charm needed: Alice IRC

[Jorge Castro]

http://usealice.org

Alice is a web IRC client with a nice UI, so it runs well on tablets and other devices.

[Marco Ceppi (marcoceppi)]

Awesome stuff! Just a few things I noticed:

Overall nice charm!

1) Since Alice takes over the output buffer, having it "start" in the install script blocks the install script and expose never gets run. I'd recommend just removing it from the install hook since you have it in the start hook already

2) It appears to install to /usr/bin/alice and not /bin/alice as is referenced in the start hook, using just `alice` should suffice since it's in the PATH

===Minor nitpicks.===

3) From charm proof:
> W: all charms should provide at least one thing
While it's not vital, charms should provide _something_, not sure if it's scale-safe or not with sessions, but it would be interesting to see if this could operate behind a load balancer or a proxy.

4) There doesn't seem to be any way to configure Alice outside of the defaults it creates, might be beneficial to allow users to configure things like quitmsg, ignore, highlights

5) If you implement configuration items, it might be a good idea to just write an upstart script for alice as well, so you can easily restart/start/stop when configuration changes are made.

Great so far! I know I'll definitely be using this :D

[Jorge Castro (jorge)]

I've addressed everything but configuration, which ALICE does via the browser.

[Marco Ceppi (marcoceppi)]

Hi Jorge!

One thing from charm proof:

> I: relation website has no hooks

The interface document[1] for website/http recommends exposing the following details: hostname and port. This should look something like this: http://charms.kapilt.com/charms/oneiric/limesurvey/hooks/website-relation-joined

Something I'm not 100% on is the placement of the open-port. I didn't have any problems running the charm and because of how the charm operates, it seems fine to be placed in the start hook as opposed to the install hook. Though a second opinion on whether this is "preferred" or if it doesn't matter would be nice.

With the exception of the missing "joined" hook for the website relation this looks ready to rock and roll!

[1]: https://juju.ubuntu.com/Interfaces/http

[Marco Ceppi (marcoceppi)]

Everything looks good, only problem is Alice still takes over the buffer, it might be better to instead push alice to the background and setup a STDOUT redirect to a log file like:

    alice -p 80 -a 0.0.0.0 > /var/log/alice-irc.log 2>&1 &

That way Alice will release the current shell and continue to complete the start hook, without doing this the start hook will never complete.