First, if you want to add a cool plugin, consider submit a pull request to the irc3_plugins instead of irc3 itself.
Feel free to clone the project on GitHub.
Once you made a change, try to add a test for your feature/fix. At least assume that you have'nt broke anything by running tox:
$ tox ... py27: commands succeeded py32: commands succeeded py33: commands succeeded py34: commands succeeded flake8: commands succeeded docs: commands succeeded congratulations :) You can run tests for a specific version:: $ tox -e py34
The irc3.rfc module is auto generated from irc3/rfc1459.txt. If you want to hack this file, you need to hack the parser in irc3/_parse_rfc.py (warning, it's ugly)
You can regenerate the module and docs by running:
$ tox -e build
You can also build the docs with:
$ tox -e docs
And check the result:
$ firefox .tox/docs/tmp/html/index.html
The project is buildout ready. You can generate binaries using it instead of virtualenv:
$ python bootstrap.py $ bin/buildout $ bin/irc3 -h