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Fossil Chat

fossil-scm.org

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Re: Fossil Chat

#81

Post by supportlocal4h »

julianlam wrote: post #13

So they built their own chat room 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…

Heh. Building an scm is a great way to become so busy you don't have time for your actual work. Building a db is another great way.

If I could be so unproductive...

Re: Fossil Chat

#82

Post by rkeene2 »

everybodyknows wrote: post #74
rkeene2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has pretty much always been a way to amend commits -- the difference is in Fossil this amendment is done by writing a new journal entry (artifact) noting which commit is being amended and how, rather than modifying the commit directly. Generally, the compiled version (base+resultant set of amendments) is displayed to the user, but the entries which modified the commit are also available to be seen.

>modifying the commit directly. Git preserves a record of the origial commit, plus amendments leading up to the final - git-reflog . The reflog is however subject to periodic pruning by default - see git-gc .

Fossil preserves the journal of activities forever, and across clones.

Re: Fossil Chat

#83

Post by sgbeal »

julianlam wrote: post #13

So they built their own chat room 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…

> I feel that's a bit short-sighted, ... You can certainly do it, but you'll run quickly into issues and be buried in feature requests

(Disclaimer: i wrote 99%+ of the fossil chat front-end code.)

FWIW...

When Richard (our Alpha Coder) first posted about his proof-of-concept app for the chat feature my inner reaction was very similar to yours. However, writing a chat front-end sounded like an interesting way to spent Christmas, so dove right in.

Now, exactly 3 months later, we've been using chat 24/7 within the Fossil project and i use it heavily on one of my own projects (hosted over CGI, and my biggest initial skepticism was whether chat could work reasonably well that way). Despite my early doubts it's been a genuine help to us within the project. i don't recall us getting more than 1 small feature request since then, and that was cut off the same way the hypothetical deluge would be: point them to the feature's scope document and redirect such users to Discord or Facebook or whatever the cool kids are using these days.

It's been remarkably low-maintenance so far. The only notable development in the /chat code in the past 3 months was the recent replacement of window.fetch with more conventional XHR because of compatibility issues with window.fetch for some clients, and that took all of 90 minutes or so to do.

Re: Fossil Chat

#84

Post by bachmeier »

jnwatson wrote: post #63

Another instance of Zawinski's Law: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail".

Well actually...

Fossil supports CGI extensions and Thunderbird saves your messages in an sqlite database. I plan to read my email from within Fossil repos. Why? Because I routinely download email messages and commit them to the repo. This will give me a web interface to read messages and, if I want, copy them into the tickets database. I can then query all the email messages related to a project using SQL.

I realize your message was not serious, but it's a real use case.

Re: Fossil Chat

#85

Post by sgbeal »

supportlocal4h wrote: post #81
julianlam wrote: post #13

So they built their own chat room 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…

Heh. Building an scm is a great way to become so busy you don't have time for your actual work. Building a db is another great way. If I could be so unproductive...

> If I could be so unproductive...

It goes much further than that...

When one views a fossil-hosted forum post from the main fossil site or sqlite's site, they are looking at...

- A forum post rendered by software Richard wrote. - Piped out to you via an HTTP server he wrote. - Served from an SCM he wrote. - Stored on a database package he wrote. - All coded in a text editor he wrote.

Complete vertical integration. He's written, or had a majority hand in, every part of the chain except for the browser. We're all awaiting his announcement about his browser project. It's only a matter of time.

Re: Fossil Chat

#86

Post by exikyut »

tomphoolery wrote: post #79
nattaylor wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some seems to have changed the password already :/ Too bad it isn't allowed for logged-in anonymous users to chat (though that would be confusing!)

i mean, this site is called "hacker" news so...

Yeah, enabling all the things™ for the chat account produced unsolicitedly predictable results. Users can now create their own accounts, and the 'chat' account I linked can only access the chat page.

This evening was a fun howtobasic in like 15 minutes

Re: Fossil Chat

#87

Post by Tenal »

exikyut wrote: post #33

HI! What it looks like: https://imgur.com/a/PaHExsp Here's Fossil 2.15 running on EC2: http://54.79.202.57/register - this link will allow you to create a new account. Alternatively, the "chat" user (password "chat") can be used if you don't want to make an account. [It used to have the ability to create additional users (with admin privs), with the result that the fossil instance rapidly began spouting SQL errors an…

Yikes.

Tip: Hire a designer.

Re: Fossil Chat

#88

Post by exikyut »

SQLite wrote: post #70
exikyut wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:O hi! Done, that's a really cool feature.

Newly registered users still don't have access to chat. I think if you add the "C" privilege to the generic "reader" user, that will solve the problem.

Thanks. For completeness, this was fixed.

Re: Fossil Chat

#89

Post by iudqnolq »

Hendrikto wrote: post #30
HeckFeck wrote: post #2

Does anyone use Fossil? I'm considering it for my personal projects. I like all it offers for the relatively low resource usage. The only use of it I've seen in the wild is Ripcord ( https://dev.cancel.fm/issues ), which is interestingly also relatively low resource usage compared to its competitor.

Fossil looks very interesting, but I completely disagree with their [stance on rebasing]( https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/rebaseharm.md ). This is a dealbreaker for me. I do not consider having 10 buggy commits per feature instead of 1 working one an advantage. It just complicates reading history and hinders debugging (e.g. bisect). I get their arguments, I just disagree.

The theory is that you don't see those 10 commits unless you choose to.

I think they're right in theory that a Sufficiently Smart^TM scm should be able to work better by not throwing data away, but I haven't tested if it actually works in practice.

> The Git documentation acknowledges this fact (in so many words) and justifies it by saying "rebasing makes for a cleaner history." I read that sentence as a tacit admission that the Git history display capabilities are weak and need active assistance from the user to keep things manageable. Surely a better approach is to record the complete ancestry of every check-in but then fix the tool to show a "clean" history in those instances where a simplified display is desirable and edifying, but retain the option to show the real, complete, messy history for cases where detail and accuracy are more important.

Re: Fossil Chat

#90

Post by ephaeton »

sgbeal wrote: post #85
supportlocal4h wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. Building an scm is a great way to become so busy you don't have time for your actual work. Building a db is another great way. If I could be so unproductive...

> If I could be so unproductive... It goes much further than that... When one views a fossil-hosted forum post from the main fossil site or sqlite's site, they are looking at... - A forum post rendered by software Richard wrote. - Piped out to you via an HTTP server he wrote. - Served from an SCM he wrote. - Stored on a database package he wrote. - All coded in a text editor he wrote. Complete vertical integration. H…

I'd rather he'd announce his MTA & MUA so we can reinstate the fossil mailing list. Going to its own quirky (at the time, haven't checked since the switch) forums meant I lost interest in being part of the (dev) community.
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