So, I finally gave in and got my self a twitter account, it is (as one would guess) http://twitter.com/sommitrealweird, me, being me, I hate having to have lots of browser tabs open for things that I should be able to access in my IRC client, with twitter this is even more obvious that an IRC client is better for reading it, lots of short messages that are text, why would you need a browser tab for that? Also it means that I've got a log of the twitter messages and can look when I feel like it. All of my IRC is done from my main virtual machine, which is also my e-mail server and web server, and thus, it's running Debian stable (currently lenny), unfortunately this does not include the Net::Twitter library that twirssi relies on.

So, first step first, how much of a PITA would backporting Net::Twitter be... well, I took a look at the dependencies and went "Well, that looks like rather more effort than I want to put in right now", however I then found Net::Twitter::Lite, which you can satisfy the dependencies (well, sortof) in Lenny... they're a few versions out, but they're close...

First part was doing :

dh-make-perl --cpan Net::Twitter::Lite

Once that's finished you'll have a Net-Twitter-Lite-blah directory, which in turn contains a debian/ directory, so you can go in there and do:

dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

That should tell you roughly what you're missing etc, from there you can check for the debian packages providing the missing libraries, and what versions they are. Install them and edit Makefile.PL to have the version numbers of the debian packages, you might also need to update debian/control to change some of it's restrictions.

Once all that is done, you should have a libnet-twitter-lite-perl package, install that and you're most of the way there.

I then cloned the twirssi source, and edited it to use Net::Twitter::Lite rather than Net::Twitter, my source is available via gitweb at http://git.sommitrealweird.co.uk/gitweb?p=twirssi-net-twitter-lite.git;a=summary. To clone do:

git clone git://git.sommitrealweird.co.uk/twirssi-net-twitter-lite.git/

or

git clone http://git.sommitrealweird.co.uk/twirssi-net-twitter-lite.git/

Hope that helps someone else out there! If you want my Net::Twitter::Lite package, let me know!