as per Zauberberg's idea in mattermost last night [1], this adds an
extra domain, which just exists to make links to the various services
shorter, using a nix to keep the whole thing easily changable.
In particular, the "shortdomain" binding should be set to some domain we
actually own before anyone deploys this (I've set it to "i4f.de" as a
dummy value for now).
Potential caveats:
- this uses ACME to get a certificate for each of the redirect domains,
which may run into rate limits if we have too many of them.
- there's nothing on the shortdomain itself. I suggest we could either
use it as a general linkshortener, or generate a list of available
domain shortcuts into html from nix
[1] https://mattermost.infra4future.de/hacc/pl/xks5naezcbn8myh79bq3dehmso
Intended for KontraIAA; requirements were that it should be a simple and
non-confusing as possible.
I tried both KiwiIRC and thelounge, and found both horrible to
package (a fact not helped by the somewhat opaque structure of
nixpkgs.nodePackages, which does contain a version of thelounge but
will apparently ignore overrides of the src attribute).
Instead, this now contains a very hacky version of thelounge, which
merely takes the already-built version from nixpkgs and glues some extra
css to it which hides potentially confusing fields.
Things hidden on the "connect" screen:
- the "name" field (since thelounge offers "nick" "name" and "realname"
by default, which seems too much for something embedded on a website)
- the "I have a password" checkbox
Things hidden on the general view:
- the button to open the side panel (the panel itself is not hidden,
and will appear by itself on wider layouts), so that users will only
see that one channel
- the "channel options" menu (which includes a "leave channel" option
which would effectively break the webchat)
Things not addressed:
- thelounge has autocompletion for /join /leave, etc. Do we want to
disable that as well?
- It would probably useful to suppress all the "x joined the channel"
messages. Thelounge supports this, but apparently doesn't support
setting it as default?
Misc:
- for now, users will be connected to #thelounge on libera.chat, which
appears to be okay with being used as an experimental channel
- I allowed prefetching link previews, but only on the server's side
(i.e. users' browsers won't fetch content from arbitrary sites)
- not yet tested on hainich, but should work (tested in a NixOS
container)
- currently assumes a "webchat.voc.hacc.space" domain (I think we had a
voc domain? but I forgot where it is …)
Among other things, this contains the "collapsable reply threads" feature
which makes it behave similar to slack.
Also, after spending thirty minutes or so attempting to teach niv that
it should really only fetch the tag "5.37.0" from the mattermost-server
repository and not any other commit, branch, or similar (there is a
"release-5.37" branch, but that seems to be for active development), I
have temporarily given up on it and typed in the urls manually.
Unfortunately, this means that any kind of `niv update` will now break
things. If anyone knows how to use niv correctly for this please patch
this; otherwise I guess we can extract mattermost out from niv again.
