Arke discussion software

Arke, the evil sister of Iris!

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What is Arke?

Arke is a discussion software for a single multi-user Unix host. It is directly inspired by iris, the forum software many ^C users are familiar with. While iris is written in Ruby and creates a single file inside the user's home dir (~/.iris.messages), Arke is written in Bash and creates a directory (~/.arke).

How do I run Arke?

Currently, you have to a) run Arke from my home dir, or b) clone the Git repo and run it from your clone:

$ /home/kiseratu/code/arke/arke.sh # option a

$ git clone /home/kiseratu/code/arke && cd arke && ./arke.sh # option b

Why did I make Arke?

I had several reasons for making Arke:

• iris feels a bit sluggish. I've definitely seen faster CLI programs.
• the topic overview in iris isn't great for small displays. My 1366x768 display just about shows enough of content, but try using iris on a phone. It's completely unusable.
• I wanted to use the `dialog` program to make a TUI application. An iris clone seemed like a perfect opportunity.
• I heard of the concept of using the "filesystem as a database" and was wondering for a time how to do that. So taking iris' concept of "one file in the user's home dir" and making that "one directory with a directory structure inside" was the logical step.
• I just wanted to learn Bash scripting better, and that alone made it worth it.

Why not improve iris instead?

I considered that. I read the source code of iris, something around 1000 lines of Ruby code. I know a bit of Ruby (wrote an API client in it once), but I'm by no means as proficient as Calamitous. In the end, I could have simply edited the lines that `print` output and added a call to `dialog` there, but I simply didn't want to invest the mental effort to understand the code first.

What did I learn from writing Arke?

Arke uses three Unix tools to do its job: Bash, `dialog`, and `find`. I learned, that `find` is usually much better than tools like `ls` and using globbing (*) (a Bash feature). However, some performance-critical parts of Arke work with `ls` and globbing, because `find` doesn't let you order files or directories in chronological order (as far as I know).

`dialog` is a pretty great tool for creating graphical user interfaces in the terminal. It takes a while to get good at using it though, practice makes perfect. A beginner would maybe not be able to use `dialog` very well, because it has a lot of traps.

I also learned to appreciate `iris` a lot, because it avoids many problems by doing things in Ruby and using json. It has features that Arke lacks so far, like showing the date and time when something was posted.

Arke vs. iris

Unfortunately, Arke is incompatible with iris due to the choice of a directory (~/.arke) instead of iris' single file (~/.iris.messages). I don't intend for Arke to replace iris in any capacity though. Instead, I hope Arke gets a few users for a while and then dies a quiet death.

Why would I want a software that I wrote to not be used, though? Well, there are basically 3 hearts beating in my chest when it comes to that:

• the developer in me wants millions of people to use Arke
• but the sysadmin in me wants standards, and iris is the de facto standard discussion software for us here.
• and then there's the idealist in me, that actually just wants us to run our own newsgroups using the NNTP protocol. there are already existing clients for that and NNTP being a protocol makes implementing alternative clients much easier

Missing features compared to iris

• Arke doesn't show dates. Data is stored in directories like ".arke/data/topics/1746390511", with the last part being a Unix timestamp, so it can easily be implemented
• An effect of using Unix timestamps as topic and reply IDs is, that if two users create the same type of file at the same time, that could lead to buggy behaviour in Arke. Arke should probably just use hashes of some kind.
• I can't think of a way to show unread topics, or topics with new answers. iris solves this by breaking its core rule "one file in the user's home dir" and just creates an ~/.iris.messages.read file to keep track of it. To be fair, as Arke has a whole directory structure for itself, it could just create a file to keep track.
• No reply count displayed next to a topic. All data that Arke shows is "live" data, meaning that any action triggers a command (`find` or `ls`) whose output is then displayed. Searching for replies in all home directories has a significant performance cost, so Arke doesn't do that when displaying topics.

The name "Arke"

In Greek mythology, Iris is a messenger of the gods. I believe the connection to messages led Calamitous, to name the discussion software that he wrote for us "iris".

Iris had a sister: Arke (Wikipedia). This quote explains what happened:

During the divine war known as the Titanomachy, Arke and Iris originally sided with the Olympian gods, but soon after Arke betrayed them for the Titans and flew to their camp to become their own messenger-goddess, while Iris remained loyal as the Olympian gods' messenger.

So when I wanted to write a program that does almost what iris does, I thought it would be funny to choose the name Arke.

Additionally, since Arke would be competing with iris in a sense, the project had a touch of evilness to it. I don't intend Arke to outshine iris in any way, though!

How can I contribute to the development of Arke?

I'm not really trying to make Arke into an actively maintained project, but you can send me a git patch or a bug report to my email here. I'll get to it when I have time :)

Screenshots of Arke