In the honorable tradition of me trying to get more Eclipse people on IRC, I’d like to announce that the ECF team has come up with a cool IRC bot that could be useful for committers. Besides the coolness of being built on all Eclipse-technology (it may be the first OSGi-based IRC bot; the hell with eggdrop and its Tcl scripts), it has useful features that are described on an Eclipse wiki entry. The current Eclipse committers on IRC use the bot as a way to quickly communicate with Eclipse newcomers on common questions or even as an easy way to get at Eclipse bugs.
Call me an old school open-source developer, but I like my IRC and IRC bots (especially when they are Eclipse-based) 😉