Chat systems to use for Haiku collaboration

Sorry for being the old grumpy guy here, but I am a bit annoyed that our discussion channels are split accross several services. The developers use IRC, the sysadmins use (or used?) keybase, and now the promotion team goes with Telegram?

Also, the server side of Telegram is not open source and in general I would prefer that we try to use open source software when possible.

This is only my personal opinion.

Also I understand that IRC is not exactly great, but I think a bit of discussion in the team and agreement on a single replacement for it would be better than each team just setting up their own separate thing.

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Perhaps Matterbridge could be used to temporarily address the problem of teams being on separate chat platforms? At least, until an agreed chat platform is settled on. Bridges arenā€™t exactly the best thing in terms of usability, but they are currently the best solution for bringing people on disparate services together.

EDIT: It uses Golang though, so it may not work quite well on Haiku yet. Could be good motivation to get a Golang port in better shape, perhaps.

You left out email :wink:
I agree we should be centrally located and https://discuss.haiku-os.org should probably be homebase. But Haiku already is active on Telegram so this is nothing new. The reason I think Telegram is a good option is that it is accessable everywhere- Win/Lin/Mac/Haiku/iPhone/Android and we can easily share files there and get live notifications on all devices. This helps keep the group together, productive and ā€œin the loopā€ in real time.

Personally Iā€™d like to see everybody in BeShare -thatā€™s native and cross platform too

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Is BeShare available outside of Haiku? Havenā€™t seen it outside of Haiku and BeOS.

Yes, there is a java based muscle client.

You left out email :wink:

Thatā€™s a different topic, Telegram and IRC are for instant messaging, email and the forum are for more asynchronous discussions. And I agree that the forum is better than the mailing list (at this point we can generally say that this forum has replaced the general haiku mailing list).

As for Telegram, there are unofficial channels there but the official ones are still on IRC.

In any case, itā€™s probably a good idea to update the relevant pages on the website with the info about the promotion team. The Telegram channel could for example be listed here: IRC Channels | Haiku Project

And probably the ā€œgetting involvedā€ section in Community | Haiku Project should get a Marketing page, with a link to your kanboard and other resources. In the long term that will work better than searching the info in blogposts.

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What other Haiku Telegram groups are there?

There is Unizone for Windows and JavaShare for everywhere. You can find both in BeShare or here are some links
http://www.raasu.org/tools/windows/
https://github.com/bvarner/javashare
http://tycomsystems.com/beshare/

*EDIT: Correction- JavaShare is not working in Linux because of Java 9. Only works in Java 8 or earlier. Boo.

If I was in charge of the Linux Promotion Team, these would be my official Linux slogans-

Linux- Itā€™s not evil, it just sucks
Or
Linux-The Cure For Hope

I quite agree here, the baseline for a service for coms of teams should probably be whether it can be used from a normal haiku install, and how screwed we are exactly when a service just decides to shut down (and as an additional point how many draconian TOS the user is forced to agree to just to communicate)
E.g for irc it would be annoying, but setting up an irc server can be done in about half an hour and not that much would be lost.
For github the git repos would be safe (duo to massive ammount of duplication and local clones, perhaps annoying to reconstruct and verify) but the issues, discussions and merge requests would be lost completly.
Telegram is just ā€¦badā€¦ their service is dishonest and their ā€˜cloud messagingā€™ approach is the antithesis of a service we can control, can trust and can expect to be reasonably secure.
Having two issue tracker types also doesnā€™t help much to make it easier to use, both teams are mainly used to their style (here haiku and haikuports).
Haiku itself already has severall issue trackers aswell, and severall review systems.
One beeing trac (website + haiku issues)
gerrit (haiku patches)
github(website patches, webkit patches, also some webkit issues)
To add to that the trac instance of haiku isnā€™t apropriate to put issues on for some software in the default install since it isnt intree.

Bit of a brain dump here, but it really seems a bit messy to me, and beeing locked out of half of them because of github sucks too (e.g when discussions are held in some random github issue and then declared as the consensus because it was discussed ā€˜somewhereā€™ is a bit annoying, as happened with the sound contest. (I actually left haiku for some time because of the hostile attitude i got about that from community member))

I am wondering if we canā€™t atleast put the haiku specific repos into one place, gerrit, even if it would be severall ā€œviewsā€ of it (e.g website.review.haiku-os.org, or whatever other seperation gerrit offers)
(heres hoping i can use gerrit in the future)

I am a bit sad that I get very little chance to discuss some issues with some devs that never use irc (e.g for my stylededit layout patch something was changed which reintroduces an inconsistency with the menu bar header, but i cant really ask on irc since the patch author isnt there (and i never had /any/ haiku dev answer emails i send to their git mentioned emailā€¦))

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Telegram requires phone number for registration that is privacy invasion and unacceptable for some people including me.

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I agree with all the points here especially the open source and privacy issues. My suggestion is to have an ā€œOfficialā€ Hub right here on this forum and to link to other platforms only when needed-meaning there is functionality there that isnā€™t here. Or even better- add any missing functionality here- like live chat for example.

Why dont you use this forum? I assume it would be possible to make a topic, where only invited people can comment.

Thats what Iā€™m suggesting- witing on the other members opinions

Is it really needed? I donā€™t see so many spam posts here.

We have the source to BeShare, correct? IMHO, we should use BeShare as our base and extend it. In BeOS days, BeShare was Grand Central, it would be awesome to see it returned to itā€™s former glory as a native killer app. Didnā€™t I see an idea about extending it for streaming? Is the muscled server able to be extended in this regard? BeShare should ship with the OS as an integral indispensable app that ties in all of Haiku users together as a chat, file sharing, streaming, coordinating way. Or I could be all wet? Please chime in and let me know.

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Yes we have the BeShare source and we have JavaShare that works well on all platforms that support java.
Iā€™m always on BeShare (username Shaka) and Iā€™d love to chat with everybody there. I also have it setup to notify me with a sound when my name is typed so I answer quickly when Iā€™m around.

P.S. BeShare is also currently bridged to the #haiku IRC chat so the chat is mirrored there

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and yes there was a discussion about extending it for streaming and also using muscle (the server part) as a Tracker AddOn for 100% native file sharing and network drives.
I agree that it should be bundled with the OS. This way you could launch it and have the entire community there to help with any questions 24/7.

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I think BeShare has the same (if not more) problems than IRC, mainly that it requires a persistent connection to the server, and so, is unusable on mobile phones. We have to face it, a lot of younger generations people will only connect with us this way, and IRC is a problem for them (I can confirm that from working with GSoC students).

It is also an unknown thing outside of Haiku, and the use of our discussion channels is also to get in contact with people outside the Haiku community. I donā€™t think requiring everyone to install an unknown and specific chat app on their systems just to reach us is a good idea.

The idea of gathering all Haiku users in one place is nice, but the use of a largely unmaintained and obscure app to do it does not seem wise. Especially when other chat systems already offer a lot more features. Thatā€™s not how you build a ā€œkiller appā€, by looking at your past glory and being nostalgic about it while everyone moves on to newer and better things :slight_smile:

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So how do we communicate in realtime in a way that supports mobile, haiku and mainstream osā€™s?