My Perl "career" got to the point where I'm trying to write an IRC bot (yeah, I'm 10 years behind). So far I've discovered Bot::BasicBot and it's pretty cool, but I'd like it to have a background thread that does things (for now, watch for new SVN revisions in our internal repo and announce them on IRC).

So I wrote a sub called watch_svn which is basically an infinite loop that prints messages on STDOUT and I'm calling it with a Bot::BasicBot::forkit method in the connected() routine of the bot.

Problem is I don't see anything printed by the bot (though it seems to be looping, i see /usr/bin/svn being spawned from time to time) and I can't figure out how to log stuff. The module has a log() subroutine and I tried passing a reference for the bot to watch_svn so I can do $self->log there, but it doesn't work.

Here's a condensed version of the script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

package Marvin;
use base 'Bot::BasicBot';

my $channel = '#irctoys';
my $server = 'my.internal.server';
my $nick = 'marvin';

#### IRC event handlers overload ####
sub connected {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->forkit({ channel => $channel,
                    run     => \&watch_svn,
                    arguments => [ $self ],
                 });
}

#### my stuff ####
sub watch_svn {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->log("watch_svn: Started main loop\n");
    while (1) {
        $self->log("watch_svn: Inside main loop\n");
        print "this should go on $channel\n";
        sleep 60;
    }
}

#### actual bot ####
package main;

Marvin->new(nick => $nick, channels => [ $channel ], server => $server
+ )
       ->run;

exit;
[download]

I only get on stderr the messages from the bot stating that it joined the server and the channel, and nothing else. Help?