Task summary

• Deprecate @intent decorator [7.1, plugin: replace intent by ctcp #1975]
  • Remove @intent decorator [9.0, when sopel.module goes away]
• Add @ctcp decorator [7.1, plugin: replace intent by ctcp #1975]
• Trigger objects need a ctcp attribute instead of parsing CTCPs into Trigger.tags['intent'] [7.1, plugin: replace intent by ctcp #1975]
  • For 7.1, it's totally fine to make a @property that just returns the value of self.tags['intent']; what's important is providing the future-compatible API ASAP.
  • Internal rewrites of how the CTCP type is stored will be hidden from plugins behind this new attribute.
• [ ] Some indication to plugins that access trigger.tags['intent'] would be good [8.0] NAK (comment w/reasoning)
• Rule's interface and subclasses define a match_intent() method that needs replacing [8.0, loader, rules: use (pre)trigger.ctcp instead of tags #2253]
  • Since those objects are documented explicitly as "internal" (and quite new anyway), we needn't worry about providing a deprecation warning/timeline.
• Callables should have their intents attribute (added by the @ctcp decorator from plugin: replace intent by ctcp #1975) replaced [8.0, loader, rules: use (pre)trigger.ctcp instead of tags #2253]
  • There's no need to keep intents as the internal attribute name, since @module.intent simply wraps the @plugin.ctcp implementation.
  • This will have to come along with changes to the loader, obviously.

Original issue description follows.

The intents feature is long dead, having been pulled from IRCv3 almost three years ago (ircv3/ircv3-specifications#271). This affects Sopel in a few ways.

First, we have a @module.intent decorator that is now obsolete, named for a dead specification that nobody is going to implement.

Second, Sopel internally handles CTCP ACTIONs (the only use case I was ever aware of for intents) by stripping the CTCP bytes and adding the "ACTION" intent to the trigger instead. That's why plugin functions wanting to act only upon ACTION messages must use @module.intent('ACTION').

Third, obviously the intents attribute added to Sopel callables with intent filters is also obsolete.

In short, there's a fair bit of restructuring to do here. A quick chat with the IRCv3 folks on freenode tells me that CTCP ACTIONs themselves aren't going anywhere, so we should be fine designing an API around those as they currently exist. Maybe we add @module.action, like @module.echo, and kill off regular @module.commands-decorated callables receiving ACTION messages at all. (That would take care of an oddity that exists in current Sopel 6.x, wherein one can do /me .command and Sopel will act on it just like a regular message, which can be unexpected.)

That same chat on IRC also told me that the direct replacement for intents is message-tags. We don't support those at all, at least not in a way that plugins can use.

I'd like to get this done for Sopel 7.0, but only deprecating @module.intent and replacing it with something else is truly important. Opening message-tags up in the plugin API can wait until 7.1+.