2022-11-23 10:58:43 +01:00
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< title > RIP in peace rchat ( and releasing its replacement ) </ title >
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< h2 > RIP in peace rchat ( and releasing its replacement ) </ h2 >
< h4 > 2022 - 09 - 21 </ h4 >
2023-04-10 17:54:17 +02:00
< p > As the title says , I am going to stop developing rchat . I will be accepting pull requests and issues but I am not going to be contributing code to it anymore . It isn ' t all sad , but the reason for this is because of < a href = " https://donut.eu.org/rautafarmi " > rautafarmi </ a >. rautafarmi recently decided to switch over from the old , crusty messages . txt method to using JSON . This meant rchat would have to be completely rewritten to use this new API , because it was not designed with it in mind .</ p >
2022-11-23 10:58:43 +01:00
< p > Which is why , I am announcing its replacement named 'iron' .</ p >
< p > iron is a fork of rchat but heavily trimmed down , with a clean codebase , much more suckless in design and of course , makes use of the new rautafarmi API . This means it isn ' t compatible with the older messages . txt method , but I hope instances migrate over to the new JSON API instead .</ p >
< p > iron , unlike rchat also fixes many bugs . In rchat for example , if you disconnect from the internet while its running , rchat will print a bunch of crap on the screen . iron checks if the user is connected to the internet before it attempts to draw anything on the screen and , of course fails if the instance cannot be connected to .</ p >
< p > Like rchat though , iron only comes with the bare minimum in terms of features . For example image sending support is not in it by default , there is a separate patch for it . iron patches can be downloaded and applied and they will extend the feature set of iron . The idea is , give the user a clean , stable base that they can build on top of .</ p >
< p > This is where rchat failed , eventually it got too many features . iron doesn 't have auto-updating, it doesn' t have image integration , no link opener , no : news , no : changelog and no : help commands . iron only has the bare minimum necessary to send messages and recieve messages by default . It is up to the user to add more features through patches . He only has to apply what he actually uses .</ p >
< p > Because of this philosophy , it is possible to keep iron stable , and alive without constantly pushing bloat to its codebase , requiring even more updates to fix the bugs created .</ p >
< p > Another note I want to add is that iron no longer has a default instance . This keeps the users secure , because if the default instance gets compromised , the default build of iron is not going to compromise its users .</ p >
< p > As of writing this blog post , all rchat patches have been ported over to iron , with additional patches being created . Anyone is allowed to contribute patches that others can apply , as long as they ' re licensed under the same license as the iron project itself ( GNU GPLv3 ) .</ p >
2023-04-10 17:54:17 +02:00
< p > Finally , it should be noted that as of writing this post , the only official instance is the official instance , < a href = " https://donut.eu.org/rautafarmi " > rautafarmi </ a >. If you are using an older instance , ask them to migrate over to the new instance , or keep using the older rchat . I will accept pull requests and issues on rchat for this reason . rchat should be stable enough for regular usage though !</ p >
2022-11-23 10:58:43 +01:00
< p > If you want to try iron , you can download it < a href = " iron.html " > here </ a > and there should be a Gentoo ebuild soon . As the page says , to install iron , clone the repository , cd into it and run < code > make install </ code >.</ p >
< p > That is it for this blog post , have a good day !</ p >
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