Fossil Chat

It isn't clear what makes bundling a chat program into your SCM beneficial. The only benefit I can see is linking to other things in the SCM like wikis and issues, but since these are available on the web anyways you can just use regular URLs in any old chat app.

The other possible benefit would be keeping chat with you for local searching and keeping it with the history of the repo, however this is designed to be ephemeral so throwing that possible benefit away. (I guess you are supposed to use Forums for that https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki)

I'm not a Fossil user, so maybe I just don't understand, but I see little to no value in this feature.

I feel that's a bit short-sighted, but I'll admit I'm only a random opinionated passer-by. You can certainly do it, but you'll run quickly into issues and be buried in feature requests because like it or not, a chat room isn't just "a couple messages being passed back and forth"

Hand rolling your own communication tool is a great way to become so busy you don't have time for your actual work.

As is stunnel, which is what the canonical fossil website uses to handle HTTPS

scm, wiki, defect tracking, a little bit of project management, and now chat room.

The entire idea of fossil is that you shouldn't need to use another website or another tool for anything related to tracking your development. It's the "I am stranded on a tropical island, what do I use for hacking on a project if I can't have github or irc or slack or any other tools out there."

In the context of fossil, chat is just a couple messages being passed around with no account taken at all for any other concerns. It's not a "chat" tool, it's a chat tool for the fossil-scm. Especially if you look at the Ephemeral feature - they delete chat messages after a certain configurable time - so they don't even have to worry about keeping messages.