Freetalk - a forum system for Freenet

Freetalk (FT) aims to provide a user-friendly and secure alternative to the "Freenet Message System" (FMS) C++ daemon.

It intends to do so by:

• integrating into the Freenet web interface by being a plugin instead of being a standalone application with its own web interface.
• being written in Java instead of C++ to avoid remote code execution exploits.
• using the Web of Trust (WoT) plugin for spam filtering instead of a single-use trust system like FMS does to ensure user "identities" (comparable to "accounts" on the regular internet) can be used across different Freenet plugins such as Freemail, FlogHelper, Sone and Freetalk itself.

Status

As of 2024 Freetalk is currently in active development by xor-freenet.
Development news are posted about every 1-3 weeks on the FMS board freenet in threads called Freetalk development news YYYY-MM.

Contributing

While the repository for the official code is hosted on Freenet's GitHub, you may consider to instead create your pull requests at xor-freenet's Freetalk repository because:

• Freenet's repository may lag some months behind the one of xor-freenet and merge conflicts can thus be avoided by using xor's repo.
• You'll receive extended and accelerated review:
  xor wrote most of Freetalk's code and is actively working on it.
• After his review xor will submit your code to the official Freenet developers for inclusion in the main repository on Freenet's GitHub.

Usage

As of 2024 Freetalk is currently in active development (see above) and NOT intended to be used.
It will first have to be changed to use WoT's new event-notifications API, otherwise it will be very slow.

If you use it nevertheless be aware that all messages will be deleted at some point in the future.
That will be necessary to conduct major changes without having to spend months upon writing code for backwards compatibility. Sorry :)

Support / Contact

You can:

• mail xor@freenetproject.org
• file a bug in the Freetalk project on the Freenet bugtracker
• or, to remain anonymous by using Freenet, post on the FMS board freenet.

xor-freenet will reply by these means within about a week.

Compiling

Dependencies

Clone the fred and plugin-Freetalk repositories into the same parent directory.
Initialize the git submodules by ( cd plugin-Freetalk && git submodule update --init ).
Compile fred by command line using ( cd fred && ./gradlew jar copyRuntimeLibs ), or for compiling it with Eclipse use the below instructions.

Compiling by command line

# With the Ant build script reference implementation:
ant
# If you get errors about missing classes check build.xml for whether the JAR locations are correct.

# With the new Gradle builder - it is fully tested against Ant (see tools/) but lacks some features.
# Its advantages are:
# - parallel unit test execution on all available CPU cores.
# - incremental builds are supported (leave out "clean jar").
gradle clean jar
# Wrong JAR locations can be fixed in the file build.gradle

The output Freetalk.jar will be in the dist directory.
You can load it on the Plugins page of the Freenet web interface.
Make sure to load the WebOfTrust plugin as well.

Compiling with Eclipse

These instructions have been written for the Eclipse package Eclipse IDE for Java Developers of version 2018-12 for Linux 64-bit, which you can get here.

1. Import the fred project into Eclipse: File / Import... / Gradle / Existing Gradle Project.
2. Configure the project to use Gradle version 4.10.3 at Right click the project / Properties / Gradle.
   Enable Automatic project Synchronization there as well.
3. Enable Eclipse's Gradle executions and Gradle tasks views at Window / Show view / Other....
4. In the Gradle Tasks view, right click fred and select Run Default Gradle Tasks.
   Wait for Gradle to finish. You can see its output and error messages in the Console view.
5. Once the above step is finished, the green Run button in the main toolbar will show a run configuration for fred in its dropdown menu.
   Open the UI to edit it at Run / Run Configurations... and there set:
   • Gradle Tasks / Gradle tasks: jar copyRuntimeLibs
     The latter ensures Gradle copies all dependency JARs of Freenet to a single directory which FT will use.
     TODO: Prefix with clean task once it doesn't break Version.class anymore.
   • Arguments / Program Arguments: -x test optionally to skip running the fred unit tests at every build.
6. Re-run fred's Gradle with the above run configuration via Run / <configuration name>.
7. Import the FT project as type General / Existing Projects into Workspace - that type is what to use here because the FT repository already contains an Eclipse project configuration.
8. Ensure a Gradle run configuration for FT is created by running the default tasks like you did for fred.
   Set its Gradle tasks to jar, or clean jar if you want to ensure the JAR is always fully rebuilt. Not fully rebuilding may cause e.g. deleted classes to persist in the JAR, though I have not tested if this still applies to a build system as modern as Gradle.

Notice: Building using Project / Build project or Project / Build Automatically or the toolbar buttons does not seem to trigger Gradle with the said Eclipse version!
It seems that this only triggers Eclipse's internal Java builder which is used to empower Eclipse's own features.
As a consequence, manually run Gradle using the aforementioned Run button in case you need the FT JAR as output, e.g. for the following debugging section.
Running the unit tests is also done by that, or by Eclipse's own UI for running tests, especially to debug failing tests with its debugger.

Notice: Should Eclipse show errors about missing JARs such as db4o.jar and say they prevent it from building: Notice that the JARs likely have in fact been created by the fred/FT Gradle builders on the filesystem already, so you can fix Eclipse to notice them by:

1. Right click the project / Gradle / Refresh Gradle Project.
2. Project / Build Project to manually start a build. Automatic building might have to be disabled in the same menu.

Debugging

• Set up Eclipse as explained in the compiling section.
• Run fred's class freenet.node.NodeStarter using the Eclipse debugger.
• Browse to Freenet's Plugins page.
• Load the WebOfTrust plugin.
• Use the Load Plugin box to load PARENT_DIRECTORY/plugin-Freetalk/dist/Freetalk.jar.
• After the plugin is loaded, Freetalk will be accessible at the Forums menu.