Revenant replaces the lich/ProfanityFE Ruby toolchain with a pure- Python stack, and the trade is deliberate: Python's library ecosystem buys capabilities Ruby cannot match, at the price of walking away from two decades of lich community work. This file records both sides with the evidence, so the decision stays inspectable instead of becoming folklore. The repo rule it anchors: revenant itself never grows Ruby dependencies (CLAUDE.md).
- The data stack: pandas / plotly / Dash. Beholder — the live experience dashboard embedded in the client — exists because these libraries do. Ruby's equivalents are abandoned (daru's last release predates this repo) and nothing like Dash exists at all. Lich users read text tables.
- Graphs: networkx. The community map is an 18,419-room,
41,438-exit graph; it loads into networkx in six lines (measured
2026-08-22, groundwork on #79) and brings weighted shortest paths,
A*, articulation points, and centrality to routing. Ruby's
rglhas been effectively unmaintained for a decade; lich's map code is hand-rolled BFS, and so is ours today — but only one of us has an upgrade path. - The scientific bench behind it: scikit-learn and statsmodels for modeling training cadence from history.db, torch for classifying game wordings (the ;mechlore unknown-message problem is a text classifier waiting to happen). No Ruby peer is within a decade of any of these.
- Stdlib breadth. The clocks dock (zoneinfo), the whole xp/sheet history pipeline (sqlite3), eltime (dataclasses), the session (threading, sockets) — substantial features with zero third-party dependencies.
- Tooling. uv workspaces with a lockfile, ruff, pytest: the entire CI is three fast tools, and a fresh clone is running in one command.
- A native GUI. PyQt6 is a maintained, first-class binding; Ruby's GUI story (Tk, dead GTK bindings) is why lich frontends are separate programs.
- Two decades of lich scripts. Combat frameworks, hunting scripts, travel systems refined since the 2000s — all Ruby, none reusable. We re-pay that tuition in captures and corpses: the 2026-08-22 cougar death (#72) taught ;athletics what lich scripts learned years ago.
- The map's embedded Ruby. Community map edges whose "command"
is a Ruby proc (
;e ...) are executable only by lich; we treat them as unwalkable, which genuinely severs some routes. (The unexplained cliffs↔Strand reachability gap in the #79 exploration may be exactly this.) - Interop tax with Ruby-shaped artifacts. LNet speaks Ruby Marshal on the wire — the chat package carries a hand-written Marshal reader just to say hello. Payable (it works, it's tested), but a tax lich never pays.
- No community to borrow from. DR-scripting-in-Python has a population of one. Every wording, timer, and mechanic gets captured and pinned here first-hand (docs/eltime.md, docs/circles.md, docs/combat.md are what that looks like).
- Terseness. A lich one-liner is a revenant script with a docstring, a main(s), and tests. We count that as a feature — the tests are the manual — but it is more ceremony per script.
The cons are a fixed, one-time cost: re-learning mechanics and re-writing frameworks, paid down capture by capture. The pros compound: every new feature gets the ecosystem (beholder, the clocks dock, #79's routing) rather than another hand-rolled corner. That asymmetry is the bet.