Two years ago, Merlin started out as a complete rewrite of Munin, the popular open source alliance IRC bot created by jester for Ascendancy. A year later Merlin hit feature compatibility with Munin and saw its first official release. However, Merlin is now so much more: the third release brought the introduction of a website fully integrated into the toolset.
Fast-forward to the present day and the fifth major release of Merlin, which is the biggest new-feature release to date. The website now includes a scan request system (which is real-time linked to users on IRC (I hope that services such as #transcendancy and #scans adopt Merlin in order to benefit from this)), a scan viewer much like the xVx parser, and an attack system that combines scan viewing with booking. More features and enhancements may also be added before the new round starts.
Merlin is available for free under the terms of the GPLv2 license; the source code can be found
here though I suggest you read the (now much improved)
readme first. As always, I am available with others in #munin on NetGamers IRC for any help required.
I urge all alliances already using Merlin to upgrade now: a mid-round migration would be messy, but the automated round-migration tool will deal with all the issues without trouble. Techies should however take note of the changed requirements, in particular the bumping of SQLA from 0.5.7 to 0.6.3 and the inclusion of Jinja2; see the above readme for full details.
Over 4000 changed lines go into this release, of which Berten has contributed nearly a third, so a huge thanks to him. Thanks also to jester and qebab, without whose prior work Merlin would not be possible!
jester would fairly often create feature-request discussions for Munin, and bearing in mind that Merlin is now used by I think 7 different alliances, I thought it a good idea to create one here.
So, if you have any ideas for new features, or ways of enhancing existing ones, please post it here! Please also pass this thread on to other members of your alliance.
Threaded Mode