[opcode]

Wanted to post in here to see if it is feasible before posting a bounty. I know they have updates constantly and don't know if that would impact using it if a version was ported to IRIX. An IRIX native Signal app would be really cool for me. What chat apps are people using on IRIX these days? Anything with Encryption?

[Raion]

Hi Opcode,

I can't give you a definite answer either way but here's a few things that I can tell you. I always check Freshports and Linux from Scratch for applications to see how difficult they are to build. Freshports nailed the official signal client:

https://www.freshports.org/net-im/signal-desktop/

It has Electron. With enough time and money electron could be ported but it's not really worth it, it'll run like ass.

Next I found this:

https://www.freshports.org/net-im/libsignal-client

It uses Rust, which isn't viable for IRIX. So thes went in the bin.

Bottom line I've not found a client that works but it might be possible to bounty a client to be made.

XMPP clients and IRC are the main chat apps that work for IRIX. SGUG has libpurple, which is part of the pidgin application. From screenshots it seems to work okay but I don't use the RSE. It's not my thing.

I have a couple of xmpp clients that I have successfully built and a couple that I need to research at some point but I haven't had the time to release much of my findings. I finally finished renovating my office recently but I then got roped into helping my neighbor peel off wallpaper for the last 3 weeks, Plus work slamming me plus a whole bunch of other things.

My suggestion would be to continue to do some research and figure out what you actually want. It's possible that through a joint bounty that we could raise a couple thousand dollars and somebody might be willing to develop a Motif chat application for something like signal, but of course that's a lot of money that would need to be raised. My main personal things right now are replacing the toolchest and creating another text editor. So that's taking a lot of my time.

[vishnu]

I tried kicking and screaming to drag the SMIRC IRC client into the modern era, it worked great for me in the 90s, modern compilers hated the original source code, but I managed to fix all that. But then when I finished the build and tried to connect to an IRC server, it just sat, and sat, and sat. And I don't know enough about the IRC protocol to try to hack that part of the program, or to even try to find out why it was hanging, so I just gave up. It was a very comprehensive IRC client back in the day, written by Sam Varshavchik who also wrote and maintains the Courier mail transfer agent, and who had a legendary flame war with the late Mark Crispin, regarding the UW-IMAP mail transport agent and the RFCs it was supposedly based on:

http://www.courier-mta.org/fud/

[Raion]

Because signal recently deprecated and started removing SMS support I'm not as keen on working with it anymore.

Honestly what I think we need is a matrix client. I'm not about to suggest one cuz I'm not really well familiar with the curses based ones