Development line 3.4dev

Development line 3.4dev

Development documentation — not a stable release

Mediabot 3.4dev is the moving development line that follows the stable 3.3 release. It is intended for testing, review and contribution. Operators who need a reproducible conservative deployment should continue to use the pinned 3.3 release instructions.

Checkout

The development tree is obtained from the repository's default branch:

cd /home/mediabot || exit 1

git clone https://github.com/teuk/mediabot_v3.git

cd /home/mediabot/mediabot_v3 || exit 1
git branch --show-current
cat VERSION

At the time of writing, the checkout reports a 3.4dev-* version. The default branch moves as development continues, so pin a reviewed commit before using it for a long-running test instance.

Do not extract the stable archive over a development checkout, and do not reuse an unreviewed development tree as though it were the immutable 3.3 release.

Current development themes

The current line includes work beyond the 3.3 documentation baseline, notably:

• per-channel language selection and bilingual user-facing output;
• a deterministic bilingual horoscope;
• richer Partyline runtime status for deferred output, achievements and archive workers;
• controlled archival of old channel history;
• archive-aware career and history commands;
• per-table historical queries with Perl-side merging instead of a large derived UNION ALL;
• stricter handling of empty results, live database failures and partial archive reads;
• first-seen semantics that remain distinct from first-message statistics.

These features remain development behavior until they are included in a future stable release.

Documentation boundary

The stable pages remain the source of truth for installing and operating Mediabot 3.3:

• Installation
• Configuration
• Release 3.3 and upgrade notes
• Testing
• Troubleshooting

Development notes supplement those pages; they do not silently redefine the stable procedure.

The reviewed archive documentation is split by purpose:

• Configuration — keys, grants and safe defaults
• Database model — live and archive table guarantees
• Partyline — runtime health and worker state
• Troubleshooting — operational checks and failures

Archive retention remains opt-in. Review those sections and test the exact instance configuration before enabling it on a production network.

Validation before testing

Before starting a development checkout:

cd /home/mediabot/mediabot_v3 || exit 1

git status --short
git branch --show-current
cat VERSION
perl t/test_commands.pl

Use a separate configuration file and database from production whenever a development instance is used for experimentation.

Reporting and discussion

Questions, bug reports and design discussions are welcome on the Mediabot project channel:

#i/o on irc.epiknet.org

The public repository remains the source for reviewed code and issue tracking.