All I can think is that it seems a bit early for April Fool's jokes.
It isn't clear what makes bundling a chat program into your SCM beneficial. The only benefit I can see is linking to other things in the SCM like wikis and issues, but since these are available on the web anyways you can just use regular URLs in any old chat app.
The other possible benefit would be keeping chat with you for local searching and keeping it with the history of the repo, however this is designed to be ephemeral so throwing that possible benefit away. (I guess you are supposed to use Forums for that https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki)
I'm not a Fossil user, so maybe I just don't understand, but I see little to no value in this feature.
If you already have a chat infrastructure set up with all the bells and whistles, then you probably don't need this; it is a different kind of workflow.
But one workflow for it would be open source projects that prefer not to have to maintain additional infrastructure and just want to inline ephemeral communication w/o having to keep it forever; then they make a design decision and have everything that is finalised moved over and documented in the wiki.
Lack of a direct messaging/email feature is one of the major lacuna of Git hub. In that light may be having some sort of integrated channel is a good thing.
> It isn't clear what makes bundling a chat program into your SCM beneficial. ... you can just use regular URLs in any old chat app.
You just answered your own question: trying to get any given group of people to use the same 3rd-party chat platform, especially one hosted by Big Megacorp (and aren't they all nowadays?), is like herding cats. Every developer on a fossil project already has an account they can use, not hosted by Big Megacorp, which they can chat over (provided the project admin permits it - they are not required to give devs chat access).
i admit that i had several reservations when Richard proposed /chat on the fossil mailing list, but i'm a 100% convert, and now use it 24/7 on two projects and get tremendous value from it.
(Disclaimer: i wrote the /chat front-end, so am inherently biased, but i'm biased towards it because it's useful, low/zero-maintenance, and low-friction, not because i've invested many hours into its development.)
It isn't clear what makes bundling a chat program into your SCM beneficial. The only benefit I can see is linking to other things in the SCM like wikis and issues, but since these are available on the web anyways you can just use regular URLs in any old chat app.
The other possible benefit would be keeping chat with you for local searching and keeping it with the history of the repo, however this is designed to be ephemeral so throwing that possible benefit away. (I guess you are supposed to use Forums for that https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki)
I'm not a Fossil user, so maybe I just don't understand, but I see little to no value in this feature.