Some form of IPC

[scott]

AWKBot needs some form of IPC. Particularly, it needs to be able to read from a TCP socket without blocking on each iteration, allowing updates from the outside world through any kind of intermediate medium.

Since this ticket is being filed after a solution has been created, I will discuss the solution:

• Create a portable TCP library
  • Socket output goes to netcat (or telnet)
    • netcat output to a temporary file
  • Socket input comes from a temporary file
    • Tail is used in order to be able to flush the file without losing data
• Create a bootstrap script which allocates a tempfile
• Start awkbot in a tail from a temporary file, letting it parse IRC protocol and events from the outside world in the AWK mainloop.

Benefits

1. Ability to communicate with awkbot process from the outside world, in relay time
2. Possible increased portability
3. Generation of a portable socket library

Risks

1. Limited

Additional

1. This means AWK Bot will no longer be 100% GNU AWK, but not by much, since it is definitely a design becoming of the AWK programming language

[scott]

Fixed in [47]