Sean (May 05 2021 at 21:18): Sean (May 05 2021 at 21:18):Spent a good bit of time looking over chat infrastructure over the past couple months and am about ready to test a bridging conversion to Element. It bridges to IRC beautifully, supports even more rich content than Zulip, and the federated Matrix protocol it uses makes integrations very easy. If anyone is interested in helping get things set up, let me know. Could use some extra hands on testing and researching how it'd be best to set it up for our community.
Sean (May 05 2021 at 21:21):I put Gitter through all the paces as well and wasn't quite as happy with how it handles things, but it has promise too since it's also on Matrix. I wasn't terribly successful getting Gitter rooms added to Element though (general errors), and Gitter seemed to insist we already had a BRL-CAD community, even though it 404's on it. Probably something legacy-related since there were some tests done there years ago, probably require support help to sort it out if we go that route.
Sean (May 05 2021 at 21:22):In all, I think the biggest question is whether to rely on matrix.org for home federation or to set up brlcad.org as a Matrix server. Not sure how complicated that is yet, but hopefully a port for it. ;)
Erik (May 06 2021 at 13:01):holmes, I'm old. I checked out with 'jabber', does the irc bridge come close to... y'know... irc? or anything that... sucks less?
Erik (May 06 2021 at 13:02):I'll be the crotchety old 'just want to get things done' test dummy :D
Sean (May 06 2021 at 14:16):It completely bridges to IRC and appears to do so very well.
Sean (May 06 2021 at 14:17):In fact, right now that's the only "room" I have in there and it's kind of the best of both worlds -- you can post images and such, and they show up as links in IRC but show embedded in Element.
Sumagna Das (May 09 2021 at 18:40):Sean said:
Spent a good bit of time looking over chat infrastructure over the past couple months and am about ready to test a bridging conversion to Element. It bridges to IRC beautifully, supports even more rich content than Zulip, and the federated Matrix protocol it uses makes integrations very easy. If anyone is interested in helping get things set up, let me know. Could use some extra hands on testing and researching how it'd be best to set it up for our community.
i can help all i can. just tell me what i can do.
Sean (May 11 2021 at 02:35):@Sumagna Das you can help me figure a couple things out... Join the BRL-CAD group on Element and see if you can figure out how / if there's a way to have all messages broadcast to IRC?
Sean (May 11 2021 at 02:35):(bridged somehow)
Sumagna Das (May 11 2021 at 02:49):it seems like they are already getting broadcasted
Sean (May 11 2021 at 03:15):@Sumagna Das you joined the #brlcad room, which it set up to bridge. The question is how to make other/new rooms also bridge.
Sean (May 11 2021 at 03:19):the community is (+brlcad:matrix.org)
Sumagna Das (May 11 2021 at 03:30):i think we have to create a bridge everytime. but i am checking up on their docs to see if there is a way to do that
Sumagna Das (May 11 2021 at 03:30):and it seems like that the current room on element is a portal room
Sean (May 11 2021 at 03:33):I created a BRL-CAD room that is not (yet) bridged, but is in the BRL-CAD community
Sean (May 11 2021 at 03:33):in addition to the #brlcad IRC bridge room
Daniel Rossberg (May 14 2021 at 14:27):To whom it may concern:
#brlcad:matrix.org#freenode_#brlcad:matrix.org (https://matrix.org/blog/2015/06/22/the-matrix-org-irc-bridge-now-bridges-all-of-freenode/) Sean (May 25 2021 at 02:52):Just a quick update -- BRL-CADs matrix channel (#brlcad:matrix.org) is now "plumbed" to the Freenode IRC channel, meaning that all messages are fully syncronized into the Matrix channel whether they come from IRC or Matrix, so you don't need to add #freenode_#brlcad any more. You just add #brlcad:matrix.org and you're good to go.
From there, all Github activity is also announced automatically (for now).
I'm looking into bridging Zulip there as well, but that's going to require a far more complicated setup.
Sean (May 25 2021 at 02:54):Where this is all going is unification of all our chat into one place on Matrix, so feel free to install Element or another Matrix client to help test things out. Once it's all working, the plan will be to eventually shut down all our Zulip streams, leaving just Matrix.
Sean (May 25 2021 at 02:54):To try it out, go to https://matrix.org
starseeker (May 25 2021 at 11:54):Is it worth bridging Zulip? Or should we just migrate to matrix?
starseeker (May 25 2021 at 11:56):If Zulip is difficult to bridge, maybe it's not worth expending the effort for a short-term connection?
Dashamir Hoxha (May 28 2021 at 09:55):Sean said:
Where this is all going is unification of all our chat into one place on Matrix, so feel free to install Element or another Matrix client to help test things out. Once it's all working, the plan will be to eventually shut down all our Zulip streams, leaving just Matrix.
I like the Zulip's approach of having threaded discussions (or topics). In Matrix, where we use one channel for everything, it is practically impossible to read the history of previous discussions, because the channel is flooded by automatic commit notifications from GitHub. At least redirect them to a separate channel.
Sean (Jun 04 2021 at 16:51):@Dashamir Hoxha Yeah, that's the biggest love/hate feature of Zulip that it appears will be lost. The topics help keep discussions neat, but also engender little pockets of silence (ignorance). I agree though that we'll want to consider separating out all the development activity event notifications, especially once we get a lot more events announcing too (CI/CD, testing, doc changes, wiki edits, etc).
Sean (Jun 04 2021 at 16:55):Wouldn't even consider an alternative if zulip had kept pace with changes and requests. It's been two years and feels like nothing has changed (at least none for the better), feature requests have gone ignored, integrations that weren't great to begin with but were working (e.g, IRC) stopped working, and project vitality seems to be generally waning.
Sean (Jun 04 2021 at 16:57):So it'll be interesting to get Zulip bridged. If that works, then folks that want threaded topics could still use the zulip client while the rest of us just see a label (I think that's how it works).
Sean (Jun 04 2021 at 16:58):The hardest aspect is that each stream in Zulip corresponds with a room on Matrix and that's no good. Will have to see if we can eliminate / ignore some streams as I currently have 8 and do not want 8 matrix/irc rooms.
Sean (Jun 04 2021 at 16:58):Will see if topics can be migrated from one stream to another.
Erik (Jun 08 2021 at 13:28):slack?
Sean (Jun 09 2021 at 05:19):gtfo with that nonsense
Dashamir Hoxha (Jun 13 2021 at 14:32):Wouldn't even consider an alternative if zulip had kept pace with changes and requests.
Have you ever considered using Discourse? It is not a chat software, it is more like a forum, but it has lots of options and plugins. In particular, it can also replace mailing lists. It is even possible to migrate previous discussions from old mailing list archives.
About a year ago I helped an organization to install Discourse and migrate their old mailing list archives: https://forum.flossk.org/ The installation is Docker based and keeping it up to date has been very easy (so far).
Sean (Jun 14 2021 at 05:14):Yes, Discourse has been considered too. To me, it solves a slightly different problem. Github issues cover some of that space fairly well, but discourse could be an alternative when we shut off our sf forums and perhaps an alternative to some of the ways the wiki is currently used for development. This is where an audit of our docs on the wiki is really needed.
Dashamir Hoxha (Sep 01 2021 at 05:25):Sean said:
Yes, Discourse has been considered too. To me, it solves a slightly different problem. Github issues cover some of that space fairly well, but discourse could be an alternative when we shut off our sf forums and perhaps an alternative to some of the ways the wiki is currently used for development. This is where an audit of our docs on the wiki is really needed.
If you decide to migrate the SF mailing lists to Discourse, I can help you (outside the scope of the GSoD project). Last year I have migrated some mailman lists to Discourse and it worked well.
Sean (Sep 01 2021 at 15:44):I see that there's a Discourse to Matrix plugin, so that might be a good solution for shuttering the SF mailing lists and forums. Would even be an improvement if postings could get announced to matrix/irc so there could be real-time discussion as well as more thoughtful forum-style discussion.
Dashamir Hoxha (Sep 01 2021 at 16:49):One of the advantages of Discourse is that it has a plugin system and lots of plugins, which makes it flexible and customizable to your needs (although I have never tried the Matrix plugin).
Last updated: Jan 09 2025 at 00:46 UTC