Phenny compatibility

Sopel is, by and large, compatible with Phenny and Jenni. It is a goal of the project that modules/plugins written for those bots will work with Sopel, with a minimal amount of effort. Plugins originally written for Willie (before the rename to Sopel) should work, too.

Note that the arguments to Sopel callables are conventionally referred to as bot and trigger. These are functionally the same as the phenny and input passed to phenny callables, and either naming convention will work.

Prior to the release of Sopel v4.1.0 (called Willie at the time), the following compatibility issues were known:

Major issues

These are likely to affect many or all plugins and deployments.

• Sopel uses unicode more frequently and consistently than Phenny. trigger objects entering your callables will be unicode, and messages sent with write, say, msg, etc. must also be unicode objects.
• Configuration files are incompatible. A tool exists to assist in converting them to Sopel’s newer, more versatile format.
• Imports of web and tools must be changed to sopel.web and sopel.tools respectively (or from sopel import web, tools).

Minor issues

These only affect a small number of plugins, and/or will fail gracefully

• Phenny’s last_seen_uri and seen are replaced by Sopel’s memory system. Plugins using them will likely still work, but may not interoperate with newer plugins as expected.
• phenny.stats will be an empty dict, which will negatively impact any plugin which uses it. This is likely limited to the .stats command in Phenny’s info plugin.
• Imports of icao are broken, as icao.py is not included in Sopel. This likely only breaks phenny’s weather plugin, the functionality of which is replaced and improved in the third-party PyPI package sopel-modules.weather.
• Imports of bot and irc are broken. There is not necessarily a simple solution, but the only plugin this is likely to affect is reload, the functionality of which is replaced and improved in Sopel.
• Callables that used the deprecated function signature from phenny (e.g. def f_time(self, origin, match, args): rather than def f_time(phenny, input):) are not supported. This will not affect the vast majority of plugins. Those that are affected can likely be made to work (though not necessarily meet current style guidelines) by removing the origin, match, and args arguments, adding a trigger argument, and making the following replacements:

There may be other issues, but they are not known at this time.

TODO: The following members of the Jenni class are used in jenni, and may or may not be present or have analogs in Willie. More research is needed: rfn, rdb, reminders, bot, doc, data, variables, notice