alt Hacker NewsI am still so salty that Git won out for the average project over Fossil. Sure Git has some performance advantages for massive codebases like the Linux Kernel, but the vast majority of projects will never run into performance limits from their VCS. Fossil’s internal tools (wiki, forum, tickets<issues>, etc) are just so useful to have versioned with your code in one file.
I use Fossil for all my freelance work and it so easily allows me to get right back into the context of a project, niche details and agreements had with a client, etc. No need to pollute the codebase or gather together a million emails or notetaking software just to get back up to speed.
It can still change, I hate the notion that because Git is so culturally embedded we couldn’t ever switch. Fossil makes it super easy to switch and the workflow is actually easier coming from Git.
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You can (and people did) do same kind of tooling based off git protocol and storage. Hell, even one for distributed code reviews.
It just... never was something majority actually want so they didn't really get any traction.
Issues wise you also get few nasty cases where you really do not want to keep it with project, like having clients send a bunch of screenshots or even videos of triggering some bugs can grow storage pretty quickly... and while extra few GBs on a file server isn't a big deal, keeping it with code repo just so someone can look at tickets locally is PITA, and you quickly get into "let's not use it, it just makes everything complicated and everyone repo bloated".
Someone could probably implement most of fossil features using git as backing store without all that much problems, the wiki/issues/whatever else features would just be separate, parallel branch hierarchy
> It can still change, I hate the notion that because Git is so culturally embedded we couldn’t ever switch. Fossil makes it super easy to switch and the workflow is actually easier coming from Git.
I was exposed to Mercurial before Git and I stubbornly tried to advocate for it over Git for a while. BitBucket, at the time, gave Github a good run for their money and had great Mercurial support and was what I preferred.
I'm not really sure VCS were ever differentiated for there to be a wide world of them. They all solved the same set of problems so similarly that it felt, to me, that there had to be one winner. Right now most of the competition is in the Git Porcelain space.
N.B. I actually have a soft spot for darcs, which was my first actual DVCS. I just loved it so much more than svn and refused to use svn in college and used darcs to actually manage my projects and push them to svn after.
When I tried Fossil it had things weirdly separated.
I was expecting when I make a commit, I would have the facility to specify what issues it addressed and it would close them for me automatically. It seemed there is so much opportunity there to "close the loop" when the issue tracker, etc and integrated in your VCS, but it wasn't taken.
Now is a great time for somebody to buy fossilhub.com and create a new community.
I wonder what tradeoffs make Git faster for large repository. Though for a long time that excluded large blobs.
I feel like part of that was timing. IIRC, when git was already stable and usable as a daily-driver, Fossil was still sometimes requiring that you completely recreate your repo when updating to a new version.
Git certainly had (and perhaps still has) worse user experience, but it worked and felt production-ready, with, of course, one of the largest open source projects in the world using it, and that made all the difference, perception-wise.