This is the history of the various MeshChat versions that have existed--at least to the best of my knowledge.
This was the original version of MeshChat written by Trevor Paskett (K7FPV) around 2015. It was written in Perl and worked well on the limited resources of the AREDN nodes. Around 2018 Trevor was not able to or not interested in supporting MeshChat any longer, it is unclear which but the project became stagnant at version v1.01 in August of 2018. There was a final release of v1.02 in September 2022 that mostly added a few patches and support for Debian Stretch.
The K7FPV code base still exists at https://github.com/tpaskett/meshchat.
In addition Trevor wrote a good amount of documentation for his versions which is still pretty well covers the current versions of MeshChat. The documentation can be found over at his blog, https://github.com/tpaskett/meshchat.
When AREDN firmware v3.22.6.0 was released in June 2022, the AREDN development team stopped including Perl in the distribution in favor of LUA. In preparation of this change Tim Wilkinson (KN6PLV) started rewriting MeshChat in LUA March 2022 with the first release of the new code base in April 2022. The new MeshChat code continued to receive bug fixes for a year. At which time Tim's involvement on the AREDN development team prevented him from continuing to maintain MeshChat.
That brings the story upto the current time, September 2023, where I, Gerard Hickey (WT0F), have started to be the maintainer of the MeshChat code base. There has already been work to restructure the repository to make working with the code more effective and to automatically build packages when a release occurs.
