Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

blog.zulip.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 153 posts

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#131

Post by tabbott »

ciupicri wrote: post #80

The install procedure [1] looks like bad a joke. > You’ll need an Ubuntu system that satisfies the installation requirements. So if I'm using RHEL, Fedora, Arch or any other Linux distribution, tough luck. If they're supporting only Ubuntu, they could have at least created some deb packages. There is an install script, but no details about what's going on under the hood or explanations of how to do it manually; what…

OP here. You can learn about what makes up a Zulip server here:

https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview/architecture...

(and get a lot more detail if you browse around the rest of our 120K words of developer documentation).

I have a great deal of Debian packaging experience (I used to maintain over 100 Debian packages for MIT's Debathena project, mostly powered by the config-package-dev project that I'm a co-author of; and then later 20+ in Debian itself as part of getting Sagemath into Debian; and I maintain the handful of Zulip dependencies that we ship versions of in our Ubuntu PPA), and so I have a pretty good sense of what does and doesn't work well with the Debian (and RHEL) style packaging models.

I'd love to support native packages for every platform, but it's a huge amount of work (especially on the maintenance side, since one needs to do QA for each platform's upgrade process) that comes out of the time we can spend on making Zulip a better product. And the result is likely to be less good error-handling; I'd rather have an installation/upgrade process that just works (and if it can't because of some problem beyond our control, like the server not having enough RAM or disk, gives a clear error message that explains the problem to the user) but is limited to one platform (which anyone can easily get; virtualization is 20 years old at this point!), than support lots of platforms but be constantly fixing little issues with the other ones.

Which isn't to say that we won't support e.g. RHEL in the future (we probably will), just that it's costly to do so, and the "Use an Ubuntu VM or container" solution works pretty well for most folks.

That said, we're open source (and an open community!) and anyone who's worked with Zulip knows that I'm very happy to provide detailed technical advice and do code review to help things like this happen.

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#132

Post by isostatic »

apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #128
detaro wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's harder to sell how the magic unicorn solves all your companies problems when directly next to it a screenshot screams "It's a chat app!" maybe?

Do companies actually pay for software they can't justify ahead of time? It took me months to justify the costs of a damn password manager and explaining why sending passwords over email and our XMPP was a bad idea

Presumably you had to justify why keepass wasn't good enough?

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#133

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

isostatic wrote: post #132
apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do companies actually pay for software they can't justify ahead of time? It took me months to justify the costs of a damn password manager and explaining why sending passwords over email and our XMPP was a bad idea

Presumably you had to justify why keepass wasn't good enough?

That is actually what I had to justify the first time (about 4 years ago), which was the more difficult one. We had a giant spreadsheet in Google Sheets with all of our logins and everyone seemed okay with it. Convincing them it was insecure and needed to be moved to Keepass was a nightmare. This took a good half year to do.

The second time (about 3 years ago), I had to convince them that team management and selective sharing were necessary and that we should upgrade to a paid software. This took several months to get approval on, even though it's only like $400 a year for us; thankfully management seems to agree that it is worth the costs now.

To be fair, I don't consider myself very persuasive so it's entirely possible that I just did a really poor job of it.

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#134

Post by fiatjaf »

dsr_ wrote: post #116
fiatjaf wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked first.

Explaining my downvote here: this doesn't add anything valuable to the conversation. Either you have a defensible point or you don't; this sort of behavior suggests that you are more interested in having an argument than a discussion.

Yes, but only because the previous commenter had that position also, by asking me the stuff he did. I hope you have downvoted him also.

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#136

Post by ciupicri »

tabbott wrote: post #122
ciupicri wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work for me with GitHub. 1. https://chat.zulip.org/register/ 2. "Sign up with GitHub" 3. "Authorize zulip" 4. Got redirected to "Sign up for Zulip" (https://chat.zulip.org/complete/github/?redirect_state=...) 5. Went to https://chat.zulip.org/ and 6. got redirected to https://chat.zulip.org/login/ 7. "Login with GitHub" 8. "Zulip account not found."

Can you open an issue on http://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/new ? We haven't heard similar reports in the year since the GitHub auth backend was added, so I'm guessing there's something special about your account (or maybe a problematic browser extension); I'd love to debug this with you.

https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/9127

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#137

Post by SXX »

skrowl wrote: post #100

I know it's marketed to gamers, but if you're looking for a free Slack alternative check out discordapp.com. It's pretty great. It supports bots, so you can easily integrate your git / trello / etc.

Problem with Discord is that unlike project targeted to corporate customers it's might break APIs hard or change UI without notice or enforce whatever weird rule they desire.

Also they burning VC money and don't yet have proven business model so investing time in adopting it for non-gaming seems like strange decision.

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#138

Post by ciupicri »

tabbott wrote: post #131
ciupicri wrote: post #80

The install procedure [1] looks like bad a joke. > You’ll need an Ubuntu system that satisfies the installation requirements. So if I'm using RHEL, Fedora, Arch or any other Linux distribution, tough luck. If they're supporting only Ubuntu, they could have at least created some deb packages. There is an install script, but no details about what's going on under the hood or explanations of how to do it manually; what…

OP here. You can learn about what makes up a Zulip server here: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview/architecture... (and get a lot more detail if you browse around the rest of our 120K words of developer documentation). I have a great deal of Debian packaging experience (I used to maintain over 100 Debian packages for MIT's Debathena project, mostly powered by the config-package-dev project that I'm a co-…

That and this page [1] mentioned by zerkten, are what I wanted. Too bad I didn't find them in the first place. Maybe they should be mentioned in the page I've complained about.

I'm familiar with RPM packaging, so I feel you pain.

I understand that you don't have native support for every platform, after all you probably don't support Windows :-) What puzzled me was the lack of instructions, so that others could at least try making Zulip work on their system.

[1]: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/development/setup-adv...

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#139

Post by tabbott »

ciupicri wrote: post #138
tabbott wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here. You can learn about what makes up a Zulip server here: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview/architecture... (and get a lot more detail if you browse around the rest of our 120K words of developer documentation). I have a great deal of Debian packaging experience (I used to maintain over 100 Debian packages for MIT's Debathena project, mostly powered by the config-package-dev project that I'm a co-…

That and this page [1] mentioned by zerkten, are what I wanted. Too bad I didn't find them in the first place. Maybe they should be mentioned in the page I've complained about. I'm familiar with RPM packaging, so I feel you pain. I understand that you don't have native support for every platform, after all you probably don't support Windows :-) What puzzled me was the lack of instructions, so that others could at lea…

Those instructions are for the development environment which is simpler in a few key ways (e.g. one doesn't need to deal with SSL certificates). But yes, that'd be the starting point for a production installer for other platforms.

Re: Zulip 1.8: Free software Slack alternative with email-style threading

#140

Post by haffla »

jannes wrote: post #87
haffla wrote: post #57

Zulip is using Python and Postgresql. Is this a great choice of stack for a chat app? I'd love to know how Zulip performs with hundreds of concurrent users. I am currently looking into Rocket.Chat which is based on Meteor (NodeJS) and MongoDB, a stack which, for me, seems better suited for this kind of app. But hey, I don't know, I haven't done performance tests or anything. Does anyone know about any hard limits wit…

Are you seriously saying PostgreSQL might not be suited for concurrent workloads?

I said concurrent users as in users that are online at the same time, each of them probably connected via WebSocket streaming and sending messages.... Thanks for the downvote...

Regarding Postgresql, are you denying that relational DBs are less suited for write intensive tasks than say a NoSQL DB like MongoDB is? And couldn't a chat with thousands of users be a more than average write intensive scenario?

Post reply on HN