Version 7.1.0
Admittedly a few months later than originally intended, Sopel 7.1.0 is ready to go. We’ve focused on polish this time around, both in documentation and features. Lots of little fixes add up to make something good—over 140 pull requests were merged for this release.
We will now begin work on Sopel 8.0, focusing primarily on modernization—dropping the end-of-life Python versions that 7.x still supports—and on unbundling the core plugins so they can be updated separately. None of these plans are new, but we figured a reminder was in order as it’s been some months since they last came up in Sopel 7.0’s release notes!
As always, you can keep up with development and give us feedback on GitHub, IRC, or Twitter.
Important note: Sopel’s IRC channel has moved from freenode to Libera Chat
(#2072). You will find us in #sopel
as always, but at a new network
address: irc.libera.chat
. At least some of the old guard will remain on
freenode for the foreseeable future, to guide anyone running an older Sopel
version to the new channel (and encourage them to update Sopel, too).
Plugin changes
- Removed
instagram
plugin, as it was not possible to fix after changes to the site [#2000] - Merged
etymology
plugin functionality intowiktionary
plugin [#1178, #2064] - admin:
- adminchannel:
- announce: speed up by sending to multiple channels if the server supports it [#1859, #2048]
- choose: safely handle formatted choices [#1965]
- currency:
- emoticons: added
.smirk
command & action responses [#1899] - find: accept either
/
or|
as delimiter, and format replacement text as bold so it’s easier to see the correction [#1993, #2014, #2066] - find_updates:
- ip: querying by nickname is no longer case-sensitive [#1915]
- isup: be more specific about what’s wrong if the site looks down [#1940, #1950, #2063]
- meetbot: tweaked handling of path settings [#1959]
- ping: added
.ping
command [#1875] - pronouns: now understands two-word aliases for the full pronoun groups [#2069]
- reddit:
- remind: added commands to count/forget reminders [#2007]
- safety: switched away from obsolete list source [#2012]
- tell: strip
@
from the start of nicknames [#1994] - tld: rewritten to be more robust [#1939, #1949, #1968, #1970, #1985, #2076]
- url:
- tweaked to improve reliability of title fetching [#1871]
- added a setting to control automatic titles [#1897]
- adapted to upstream dependency changes [#1989]
- add
.urlexclude
/.urlallow
commands [#2028] - auto-title now ignores URLs in any other command [#2028]
- fixed showing an error when appropriate [#2029]
- wikipedia:
- xkcd: show latest comic when base URL is linked [#1858]
- Built-in plugins’ output formats were checked for consistency [#1937]
- Improved plugin documentation/help [#1878, #1952, #1954, #2002, #2035]
- Updated some plugins to use new API features [#1879, #1892, #1894, #1995]
- Minor code style fixes and cleanup [#1856, #1880, #1910, #1953, #1960]
Core changes
- Sopel’s outbound flooding protection is now configurable [#1929]
core.modes
setting now only assumes+
if no sign is included in its value [#1941]- Improved documentation of core configuration settings [#1861, #1866, #2006]
- Documented use of environment variables to override parts of Sopel’s configuration [#1901]
- Improved command-line error messages [#2047]
- Unexpected settings in config files will now generate warnings [#1973]
- Improved SASL handling [#1928, #1971, #1976, #1977]
- Change/recover in-use nick; fix
USER
syntax [#1930] - Improved channel mode tracking [#1980]
- Improved channel member tracking [#1997]
- Reduced log spam from core
MODE
handling logic [#1951] - Refactored the Rule system [#1873, #1894, #1904, #2011]
- Reworked IRC connection timeout management [#2041]
- Fixed loading callables that should be ignored from plugins [#1936]
- Streamlined how the bot generates help text for plugin commands [#2071]
- Fixed signal handling (e.g.
^C
) if bot is not connected [#1893] - Fixed crash if a plugin tries to
sys.exit()
[#1943] - Fixed crash if IRC backend is uninitialized and logging to a channel is enabled [#2020]
- Improved scheduled job handling [#1891, #1927]
- Improved test coverage [#1983, #1984]
- Improved test infrastructure [#1905]
- Minor code style fixes and refactoring [#1864, #1890, #1933, #1942, #1969, #1998, #2005, #2023]
API changes
- Moved plugin decorators to
sopel.plugin
;sopel.module
is now deprecated [#1898, #1906, #1924, #1967]- Decorators that are new in Sopel 7.1 or later will appear only in
sopel.plugin
;sopel.module
contains only a snapshot of what was available in Sopel 7.0 and will not be updated - The old
sopel.module
imports will be removed in Sopel 9.0
- Decorators that are new in Sopel 7.1 or later will appear only in
- The
intent
decorator is replaced byctcp
, andtrigger
objects now have actcp
property [#1975]- “Intents” were an IRCv3 spec idea that never took off, and the draft specs for them are now long abandoned
- See #1683 for the full deprecation and removal plan
sopel.tools
functions related to command patterns/regex are now deprecated [#1944, #2027, #2034]tools.get_input
is now deprecated [#1872]bot.(un)register_url_callback
functions are deprecated [#2049]- These are simply no longer necessary after the Rule system rewrite
test_tools
submodule is now deprecated [#2003]- Sopel now provides a
pytest
plugin; use that instead
- Sopel now provides a
- The use of whitespace after
$nick
placeholders in plugin rules is now less confusing [#1920] - Sopel now explicitly supports running plugins’ event handlers before/after core has processed the event [#2018]
- Added more tools related to
tools.time.seconds_to_human
[#2026] - Added a warning when plugins use
bot.memory['url_callbacks']
[#2033] - Added
SopelIdentifierMemory
class totools
[#1938]- This offers a less error-prone alternative to using a plain
SopelMemory
, which often requires manually casting user input to theIdentifier
type
- This offers a less error-prone alternative to using a plain
- New
plugin.require_bot_privilege
decorator andbot.has_channel_privilege
method [#1982] - Added
plugin.find
andplugin.search
decorators [#1881] - Added
plugin.rule_lazy
,plugin.find_lazy
, andplugin.search_lazy
decorators [#2037]- These are for plugins to define rules that depend on the contents of
Sopel’s settings object (
bot.config
)
- These are for plugins to define rules that depend on the contents of
Sopel’s settings object (
bot.say
now allows even more control over variable-length content via optionaltruncation
andtrailing
parameters [#1958, #2050]bot.trigger
now has aplain
attribute, containing the received line with formatting stripped [#1918]Channel
objects now contain information about channel modes [#1980]- Added a
BooleanAttribute
setting type [#2044, #2059]- Use of
ValidatedAttribute
withparse=bool
is now considered deprecated so we can remove the monkey-patching in a future release, and will raise a warning if used
- Use of
- Added a
SecretAttribute
setting type, andis_secret
parameter toValidatedAttribute
[#1879] plugin.example
now supports running plugin tests with VCR.py support [#1853]bot.isupport
will return an emptyCHANMODES
if unadvertised [#2015]- Make
tools.time
andtools.web
submodules available with justfrom sopel import tools
[#1948] - Added new optional
warning_in
andstack_frame
parameters to thetools.deprecated
decorator, which now outputs its warning via logging [#1872, #2046, #2058] MockIRCServer
methods now block by default [#2065]- Improved documentation for writing & testing plugins [#1923, #1964, #2013, #2067]
- Improved documentation of various Sopel components:
- Tweaked documentation styles for easier readability [#1932]
- Note: We plan to change the documentation theme entirely for Sopel 8, to something much more modern