On feb 13th I joined the pyladies folks (along with a friend, @btanaka) to learn about how to make an irc bot.
There was no formal presentation, but it was a great opportunity to get together with friends and hack. The notes from the event can be found here, with relevant code found at this github repo.
I can understand why Rachel would have started with a repository that wouldn’t have required a single sudo or pip command: K.I.S.S. There is overhead associated with teaching pip/virtualenv/etc. when people don’t know what that is.
After perusing the code in that repo, however, I thought that there had to be a simpler way. Back in December the question of making an irc bot came up in the BayPIGgies mailing list, and Guido hisself answered with one word: Twisted.
I thought I ought to look at what it would take, and turns out that it isn’t much (my code on bitbucket). I made this repo/package so that people could grab it with pip and have something that runs, or fetch the source, run a simple python setup.py develop, and hack on code while still having a properly installed entry point. I hope someone finds it useful.