> To help the team stay in touch, a custom chatroom has been created using a Tcl/Tk script. The same script works as both client and server. The chatroom is private and uses a proprietary protocol, so that developers are free to discuss sensitive matters without fear of eavesdropping. The chatroom is implemented as just over 1000 lines of Tk code, and is thus accessible and easy to customize.
Curious if anyone has more details on this. Does it have encryption?
The paper is from 2017. Fossil got chat support in 2021 and the developers now use Fossil-chat. https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/chat.md
Fossil chat has the advantages that (1) it is fully encrypted and (2) it works from any web-browser, including on mobile phones.
Does fossil have something similar to Git-LFS? I'd like to store binary assets like PNGs and music files and such
It by default doesn't allow any binaries at all, nor CRLF files <https://fossil-scm.org/home/help?cmd=commit#:~:text=may%20be...>, nor whatever default value it has for "oversized"
That said, to the best of my knowledge git-lfs operates upon stdin and stdout, like much of git, so I'd guess you could actually just commit the tracking file and manually run $(git-lfs scrub) et al. I do hear that "manually run" isn't the same as the way it works in git, but that's why fossil does things the fossil way
Incorrect. The whole sentence is:
"may be aborted if a file contains content that appears to be binary, Unicode text, or text with CR/LF line endings unless the interactive user chooses to proceed. If there is no interactive user or these warnings should be skipped for some other reason, the --no-warnings option may be used."
I use fossil and checking in binaries works beautifully. You _do_ get a warning, but as seen in the documentation, you can use --no-warnings if you don't want that.
Note however, that you can't use diff on binaries, and since the entire history of the repository and the versions is shipped to all developers, storing large binaries quickly becomes cumbersome. I would in that case, store links to binaries, which themselves are stored in an archive, or switch to another scm program.
As for storing binaries, unversioned files have no history, and are not synced automatically.
Yes, it is called "unversioned files" in Fossil, but the max size is limited to what SQLite can handle in a single blob (so ~4Gbytes)
https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/unvers.wiki
Not the same thing, but in addition to binary file support as mentioned in other comment, fossil supports adding unversioned files to the repository that are not version-managed at all. Might make sense for some large files if you just want it available but not versioned (only using space for the latest version) or automatically checked out.
https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/unvers.wiki
> On the server-side, message text is stored exactly as entered by the users
I suppose the encryption is only at the TLS layer?
> I suppose the encryption is only at the TLS layer?
Correct unless the fossil repository in question uses SQLite's SEE (encryption) extension (which fossil can, but relatively few repositories use that, AFAIK).
Fossil comes with a chatroom feature (https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/chat.md). Could that be what they're referring to?
they refer to it's precursor, as per a sibling comment.
E2EE group chat in 1000 lines would be rather impressive
With a lot of the code that may be stashed away into libraries, it doesn't seem all that remarkable. I think the higher level logic and control flow for E2EE group chat could be condensed to 1000 lines with the proper abstraction. Tcl probably helped with that abstraction so credit where it is due.
Fossil-SCMs chat is not E2E encrypted but it does at least use TLS.