Fossil: A decentralized version control, bug tracking, and wiki software

by Rexxar • 10 years ago

227 98 10 years ago

Fossil is really cool. It never really caught on, which is kind of a shame.

OTOH, it's competing with git, a very well-designed piece of software with ungodly marketing (and a terrible UI, and it was so well designed because McVoy's various projects had already made many of the mistakes that Git didn't, although it avoided some of Git's mistakes, so Linus had something to work off of. But that's not the point).

yitchelle• 10 years ago

with ungodly marketing

Was the the marketing of git basically due to the fact that Linus created it?

JoshTriplett• 10 years ago

Developer word-of-mouth in general, combined with the massive network effects of a version control system. Once you use a VCS because software you work on uses it, if you want to start your own project, you tend to use what you know.

wangchow• 10 years ago

Git was designed for the Linux kernel source which everyone using android or another Linux distro is interested in. That helps a lot because if it can handle that project surely it can handle any other codebase.

adambrenecki• 10 years ago

I think it had more to do with GitHub than anything else. In GitHub's early days, they put a lot of effort into marketing Git (e.g. the now defunct "Git Is Better Than X" website), because they needed people to use it in order to use GitHub.

plq• 10 years ago

IIRC people DID give fossil a chance but it turned out it could eat your data. So adoption stopped abruptly. Losing data is very difficult for someone who knows how to use git reflog.

todd8• 10 years ago

This page, http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil-v-git/wiki?name=Fossil+vers..., on the fossil-dcm.org site makes the following claim [emphasis mine]:

Fossil uses a transactional database for local storage, meaning that the repository is protected from corruption even if a crash or power failure occurs in the middle of a commit. Extensive self-checks protect the repository from corruption from bugs. No work has ever been lost due to a software bug in Fossil.

I've never heard that Fossil could eat your data. I don't use it now, but I've tried it for a few personal projects and liked it.

minusf• 10 years ago

[citation needed] ?

no software is perfect, but fossil uses sqlite under the hood and is developed by the author of sqlite. a fairly strong data integrity guarantee in my book.

dalke2• 10 years ago

I know about https://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.o... where a bug in Fossil in trying to figure out what check-in to update to, followed by a user attempt to recover, ended up deleting edited/uncommitted files. Details in http://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.or... .

Would that have been fixed via reflog?

What other failures have there been?

To note, many heard about Fossil because of Zed Shaw, who was bitten by the bug, and wrote about leaving Fossil because of the data loss. I wonder, therefore, if your recollection is echoes of that one report.

Fossil users pipe up in HN comments, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12665875 from a day ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12655740 from 3 days ago, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12622773 from a week ago, so there are active users.

nomadbyte5• 10 years ago

Indeed, a Fossil repo is actually a SQLite db, one you may as well open and tinker with (at your own risk :). By the same token, it's just as easy to back these repos up, as much as copying the db-file. Or automatically push to a remote. Cron job -- done!

Of course, mishaps happen, bugs too. Blaming SCM is easy, blaming no-backup habits, well, that's personal.

Fossil does get progressively more potent, I can attest to this on my user experience at least from v1.19 to v1.35. Many convenience features are added, yet core remains stable.

alphapapa• 10 years ago

https://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.o...

To be clear: Fossil should not have malfunctioned. Yet even so, no work was lost as a result of the malfunction. The safety mechanisms built into Fossil did their job and uncommitted changes were preserved. The work was lost when Zed panicked and started entering a bunch of additional commands, in an attempt to recover, without stopping to think through what was happening. In fairness to Zed, I might well have done the same thing.

9mit3t2m9h9a• 10 years ago

1. Losing uncommitted changes by making two mistakes in a row after non-intuitive behaviour by the VCS is not unheard of in Git.

2. Git is strictly worse than both Fossil and Monotone (two SQLite-based DVCSes I have used) w.r.t. losing _committed_ changes: it doesn't do any sync calls by default, and while their documentation confidently says that fsync is just a waste of time, POSIX guarantees are not enough for safety (ext3 guarantees are enough, btrfs are not — writes to two different files are not guaranteed to be ordered by default, and I have lost commits because of a power failure, and I haven't checked what guarantees ext4 provides there).

pampa2• 10 years ago

People keep talking about git's terrible UI. I dont get it, anybody who had used subversion or cvs before could grasp the basics in like 5 minutes and have much better user experience.

em3rgent0rdr3• 10 years ago

Just because A is better than B doesn't mean that A is good.

feld• 10 years ago

http://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/

phantom_oracle• 10 years ago

Link to comparison: https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v...

gaxun• 10 years ago

I'm reading the page on how the distributed bug tracking works. I've heard of Fossil before but never dug too deeply.

But if a timestamp on a ticket change artifact is off by months or years, it can seriously confuse the replay algorithm for determining the current ticket state.

I understand the simplicity of merging all the ticket comments by timestamp, but couldn't they at least include a reference to one or more recent comments to help establish order when clocks are off? Still wouldn't avoid intentional bad actors, but there are bound to be people with misconfigured clocks.

If I'm working on a Fossil repository and I want to see what bugs everyone else has reported, where do I go to get a list of other copies of the repository so I can query them for new bug reports? Is there some kind of tracker that lists all the people currently publishing the same Fossil repository, so I can connect to each one and ask for updates?

I wrote a post [0] on my site about this concept recently. It's not really polished, I think the thoughts were incomplete. It was written in the context of git due to its ubiquity these days, but the concept should apply the same to other DVCS. I know I'm full of a lot of questions and few answers, but questions help me learn.

[0] https://www.gaxun.net/ideas/git-announce/

noobermin• 10 years ago

I've heard of Fossil before but never dug too deeply.

Pun not intended?

wyoung211• 10 years ago

there are bound to be people with misconfigured clocks.

Let's step back a bit here, and realize that ticket tracking is typically one of the things you restrict access to in a Fossil repository. You're either running a private instance and have the whole repo locked down, or you're running a public instance and at least require a valid login before users are allowed to post tickets. The SQLite.org repo doesn't even allow normal users to post tickets; that feature is restricted to the core development team, with public-originating items going into the ticket tracker only after being discussed on the mailing list first.

(This policy also eliminates ticket spam.)

Therefore, the number of users that can confuse Fossil this way is small, and the Fossil server admin probably knows how to contact all of them.

Given that, the only way you're likely to confuse Fossil via this weakness is to have two people with clocks maybe a large fraction of an hour off both modifying the same ticket within an hour's span, so that the person with the bad clock appears to be making comments before the comments from other users. (Or vice versa if the clock error is in the future direction.)

So, we have an error case that can only happen among a small number of users, and only when someone isn't using NTP like they ought to, and then only when we have multiple users modifying a particular ticket in a small time window, and when it happens, it only causes a bit of web UI weirdness, not data corruption.

There's your answer, then: why spend much time fixing an extremely rare case with such minor consequences?

If it really bothers you, the Fossil project regularly accepts outside contribution patches.

where do I go to get a list of other copies of the repository so I can query them for new bug reports?

You don't have to. Fossil syncs all artifacts back to the repo it cloned from, not just code artifacts. This includes not only tickets, but also wiki articles, etc.

The only weakness here is that Fossil's autosync feature doesn't happen on certain types of updates, including ticket changes, so you have two choices: manually say "fossil sync" to push ticket changes to the central repo, or wait until the next code commit, which will gather up the ticket changes and send those along with the code commit.

I don't know why Fossil doesn't autosync local ticket changes, but I'm sure it's purely a matter of development time and will, not a designed-in weakness. If you want remote fossils to autosync their local ticket changes, it should be easy to add the feature.

Is there some kind of tracker that lists all the people currently publishing the same Fossil repository

In the context of your blog post, Fossil generally isn't run in the git "just fork me" mode of operation. It can run that way, but it's much more commonly used in the central-plus-clones model, where there is a canonical central repository and a working clone on each developer's machine.

This mode is encouraged by the Fossil autosync feature being turned on by default, which means each local checkin also syncs to the central repo.

You can turn autosync off, in which case Fossil works more like git, where a clone is allowed to go off on its own tangent relative to the repo it cloned from. However, that buys you many of the problems of Git relative to Fossil, such as that merging can be a pain. Autosync greatly increases the chance that any given commit will apply cleanly.

X86BSD• 10 years ago

I absolutely love Fossil. I'm really glad to see it show up on HN. I've never heard of it eating data before.

hvidgaard3• 10 years ago

It hasn't. There was a bug that would delete every file except the modified ones. If you panic there, you could end up deleting your modifications because you tell fossil to.

It gained quite a bit of attention because Zed A. Shaw was bitten by it. Nevermind he didn't make a single commit for 3 days, or that he panicked, or that he didn't even make a simple "backup this folder so anything I do doesn't mess it up" as is standard with all other DVCS when something goes wrong. Fossil is fine in this regard, but a rebase function would be welcome.

Karupan2• 10 years ago

I used Fossil for about 4 months on a project. Found it easier than git in terms of CLI usability. The inbuilt UI, although not polished, is pretty usable. And the entire project is pretty much a single SQLite file. It definitely hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.

P.S: It's primary author is known for another piece of software that runs pretty much everywhere - SQLite!

wyoung211• 10 years ago

The inbuilt UI, although not polished

If your experience was more than about half a year old, you might want to look at it again. The default skin changed recently to one that is much more of a modern web UI.

It is easy to switch the skin on an existing repository or to customize it to behave the way you like. Fossil currently ships with 10 distinct skins, by my count.

xwattt• 10 years ago

skin

The problem of fossil UI is not a skin. Why that annoying commit hashes are so big? Do you really read them first? Take a look at github UI: every button and label have meaningful place and polished. And that is the problem of most github clones - they forgot to hire a designer.

Karupan2• 10 years ago

Yup, I used it about 2 years back. Will give it a shot again. Thanks!

PeCaN2• 10 years ago

I use fossil for all my personal projects. It's absolutely a pleasure to use. Not much more to say about it, it's a tool that's easy to use and gets the job done.

Easy to export to a git repo too, e.g. to mirror to GitHub (which I do).

em3rgent0rdr3• 10 years ago

could you provide your code/instructions for mirroring to GitHub? I presume you mirror on every local commit?

PeCaN2• 10 years ago

Nothing fancy, I just do

  fossil export --git repo.fossil | git fast-import

manually every now and then. I could set up a fossil hook to do it, but I haven't quite bothered to yet.

nomadbyte5• 10 years ago

IMHO, no need to actually mirror. You may simply keep the same project under both Git and Fossil, just add ".fslckout" and "_FOSSIL_" to your .gitignore.

1) Setup Git repo on GitHub. 2) Clone the Git repo. 3) Create local Fossil repo. 4) Add the cloned project to Fossil repo. 5) Work with Fossil. 6) Add/commit completed features to Git. 7) Push to GitHub. 8) Pull/Update respectively.

A bit of overhead, but for personal projects easy to get used to.

LVB• 10 years ago

I like a lot about Fossil and moved many projects into it for a while. What I eventually couldn't tolerate was the lack of rebase (and history rewriting in general). There are extensive debates going back years on the Fossil mailing list about the topic, but ultimately the authors were pretty firm that rebase/rewriting history is bad and they didn't want to support it.

My local workflow uses commit rewriting a lot in order to keep a useful history. I commit like crazy and then squash/reorder/rebase to make a nice logical history (http://gitup.co is awesome for this on OSX, BTW). I couldn't do this, at least at the time, with Fossil, and ended up with piles of not-very-useful commits.

cm32• 10 years ago

Yeah, git doesn't restrict you in that regard and supports both workflows, which may differ from project to project. Mercurial has a nice improved version of this, where it's safe to rewrite locally but you're not allowed to rewrite public history. I think that's a smart compromise, although if the project you're working on has the concept of patch queues, like the linux kernel and others, then mutable history to maintain patch queues is a feature, which in fact had been supported by a few extensions before the new mercurial rebase implementation landed.

petre4• 10 years ago

Fossil also has private branches.

midnightmonster• 10 years ago

I think the fossil way would be to do your work on a branch and then merge the branch. Merges are squashed automatically, and it's easy to retroactively designate a commit as the beginning of a new branch in case you didn't realize where you were going when you started.

wyoung211• 10 years ago

Yes, exactly this.

Not only does working on a branch sequester each developer's individual insanities until merge time, it lets other team members keep an eye on that branch so there aren't big surprises when merge time comes around. We want both aspects, not just one or the other.

Back in the early days of computing, a programming team was likely to share a single expensive computer.

Then we had the PC revolution, so each developer could have his own computer, but we kept those devs in cube farms or similar shared working spaces, and they had a LAN to coordinate their work.

Then the Internet happened, and we started doing distributed development, so we invented Subversion and mailing lists and suchlike to give team members a way to coordinate their efforts.

Then we got DVCSes, which have their uses, but they cause a new problem, which is that they let developers fork the project and go off on a tangent, completely unmonitored. When they pop up weeks or months later with a new feature, that feature may not even merge cleanly, or if it does, it may not align with the core developers' vision of where the project is going. So, the fork is never healed, and you end up with a choice of forks, no better than old-style project forks, where the dissenters just copied the project repo.

This problem was solved in the Git world by Github, which effectively turns forks into a special kind of branch, in that you can trace forks from parent repos to children, and merge child forks back in just as easily as internal branches.

Fossil solves it differently by strongly encouraging a central-and-clones model: it helps maintain team cohesion in a distributed development environment. Fossil actively fights against users going off on a tangent. This is a good thing.

You can force Fossil to work like stock Git, but its default configuration fights against that, on purpose.

hvidgaard3• 10 years ago

I used to belong to the no-rewrite history camp. But after maintaining a repository for a team of developers that is not as punctual with commits and history as myself, it has made me value rebase quite a bit. I'm not overly concerned with authenticity of the history until it's on the live branch, and I prefer a clean history above all.

SwellJoe2• 10 years ago

Fossil has always seemed really cool, but I don't know if having everything in one big dependency bundle is actually a good thing. For a variety of reasons, there will never be a consensus on the right issue tracker and wiki for every project (and Fossil's implementation is necessarily quite lightweight and light on capabilities compared to the big guys), so having them all tied together in an integrated whole is probably one reason Fossil as a revision control system didn't take off. It caused bunch of people to select out because they were thinking, "Well, we can't use this tracker or this wiki, because we need X and Y from our tracker/wiki. This system isn't for us."

That said, I'd love to see these features built as add-ons to git; it wouldn't be particularly difficult (no more difficult than developing a ticket tracker or a wiki independent of git). Then again, I'm uncomfortable with the repository dragging in lots of big stuff like screenshots and diagrams and such, which are very common for bug trackers and wikis and less common for code repositories (and something git historically didn't do well, anyway).

Perhaps having a separate git repo for each piece (source, bugs, wiki) and a convention of including links to them inside of special hidden file (like .gitignore) would be the right thing. But, then we don't have the issues and docs following the code around very closely, which gives up some of the positives.

But, out of the box, Fossil is a really nice looking system. If I weren't working with other people who already know git (which describes almost everyone everywhere), I'd probably give it a go. But, I am, so I won't.

wyoung211• 10 years ago

I hear what you're saying, but I don't think someone evaluating Fossil should say things like, "We've always been a Bugzilla/MediaWiki/whatever shop, so we won't use tools that don't integrate with that." Instead, they should evaluate whether Fossil's version of those features provides what they need.

Specifically regarding the ticket tracker, someone evaluating Fossil should realize that it is really flexible:

  https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/custom_ticket.wiki
  http://www.sqliteconcepts.org/THManual.pdf

If you don't like what Fossil's ticket system does out of the box, you can probably make it do what you need with a small amount of customization.

I don't mean to be rude or cast aspersions on you, but there's a lot of FUD like this surrounding Fossil. People look at multicolumn feature lists and see this one weird feature in one of the non-Fossil columns that has a check where Fossil doesn't and write Fossil off because they think they might need that feature. This kind of thinking is why there are so many 4x4 SUVs in the grocery store parking lot.

The simple fact is that there are a whole lot more relatively small software development teams than there are huge teams that really need a large fraction of the features in the large competing software packages.

Realize that I'm saying this about a DVCS that was designed to fit the needs of SQLite.org. If your team, code base, and community isn't larger than that of SQLite.org, it's "small" in this context, and can probably work happily within Fossil's limitations. Just as you won't be putting your Jeep Grand Cherokee in 4-Lo to get out of the parking lot, you probably don't actually need everything that, say, Bugzilla provides over Fossil's ticketing system.

Now, if you're comparing Fossil ticketing to Redmine + the Scrum dashboard plugin, and your project management is currently based on that workflow, that's a horse of a different color. But then, there's nothing preventing you from ignoring Fossil's ticketing feature and continuing to use your existing project management system.

SwellJoe2• 10 years ago

I agree with you, but I think a whole lot of people working with small teams are tied up in the Github workflow, and the ancillary third party tools around it, and would find migrating a chore not worth the effort (and they'd lose a few things, as well). I'd like to be less tied to proprietary stuff, but the ship seems to have sailed on that, at least for now, until Github turns evil or starts to suck.

antman• 10 years ago

nitpick [0] uses your git branches for bug tracking, and has a very easily customizable interface [1]

[0] https://github.com/tst2005/nitpick

[1] http://travisbrown.ca/projects/nitpick/docs/nitpick.html

chriswarbo• 10 years ago

Thanks, I've been looking for a distributed bug tracker (for use with git) for a while. bugseverywhere seems unmaintained, and all of the other info I could find was about abandoned projects from 2011.

I'll give nitpick a go :)

starseeker• 10 years ago

I'm quite intrigued by the libfossil project (http://fossil.wanderinghorse.net/repos/libfossil) which attempts to make the core fossil VCS abilities available as a library. To the best of my understanding this is and will remain a "spin-off" project of the main fossil project, but it looks like as of August 2016 there is still active work on it.

The combination of the BSD license and a self-contained C library in the style of sqlite that offers VCS capabilities app developers could build into their applications is extremely enticing. libgit2 (https://libgit2.github.com/) may have matured enough to be viable for that use case if one is comfortable with GPLv2 plus linking exception, but the sqlite-style include one header, build one C file and you're done integration is really really nice.

smegel• 10 years ago

Hell of a thing to write something like that in C.

bch2• 10 years ago

Ostensibly, fossil is not written in C, but a high level language - SQL.

wyoung211• 10 years ago

There is about 94 kSLOC of C code in Fossil at the moment, not counting SQLite itself, according to SLOCCount. SQLite more than doubles that line count.

By that measure alone, about half of Fossil is "SQL", in the sense that more than half of the code merely manages the various DBs.

(A Fossil workspace consists of three SQLite DBs: the actual repo DB plus two machine-specific DBs, one local to the project and one global to the user login.)

There is a whole lot of embedded SQL among that C code. Simply counting the number of lines containing the 5 most common SQL statements:

SELECT: 2069 INSERT: 583 DELETE: 492 UPDATE: 410 REPLACE: 122

That doesn't mean the total number of embedded SQL statements is the total of those 5 numbers, as some of that will be compound statements using two or more of the above keywords. Fossil uses some of the most complex SQL I've ever seen outside of http://thedailywtf.com/

So, while Fossil does rely very heavily on SQL, I wouldn't say it is "written in SQL." It merely delegates as much as is sensible to SQL, in the same way that a fair bit of the Fossil web user interface uses Javascript rather than call back to the Fossil binary on the server via POST and such to fetch an updated page.

rwbt• 10 years ago

Love fossil. I use it for all my projects. Simple and easy to learn CLI (unlike some other popular DVCS) and the built-in issue tracker/wiki is very helpful. For indie devs or small teams fossil 'just works'.

SQLite2• 10 years ago

Original author of Fossil here, with two comments:

(1) Fossil was created for the single purpose of supporting SQLite development, a mission at which it has succeeded spectacularly. Fossil is therefore a success story, irregardless of its mind-share relative to Git. That thousands of other developers also find Fossil useful on their own project is just gravy. I am not concerned that Fossil has not (yet) become the "one true and great DVCS". My intent is to continue personally supporting and maintaining Fossil for at least three more decades.

(2) Git people: Please steal ideas and code from Fossil. This is not about winning and losing; it is about providing the best possible tools. Fossil has a number features which are missing from Git but which could be easily added to Git and would enhance the Git-user experience. I'm not talking about the philosophical differences between Fossil and Git (which I recognize that Git is unlikely to ever change) but rather specific UI features such as "fossil all" or "fossil ui" or "fossil undo" or the ability to view the ancestors of check-ins. Fossil is 2-clause BSD, so you do not even have to acknowledge where you stole the code from. Do it for your users, please.

mysterydip• 10 years ago

Never heard of it before, but I'm grateful to hear about it! My projects were always small enough that a traditional version control system wasn't worth the time to set up. Just keep an archive of each day's progress in a folder and call it done.

With my latest project, I'm maintaining multiple splits of the codebase for different platform-specific features, and sharing the code with a team member. I was about to bite the bullet and start installing cvs or git in a VM and going through the learning curve, but this seems right up my alley and the kind of system I'd mesh with well. Thanks!

lucaspiller2• 10 years ago

My projects were always small enough that a traditional version control system wasn't worth the time to set up

There's no such thing as too small: I use Git for everything, including small scripts I may never use again. The setup is "mkdir fooscript && cd fooscript && git init". Plus using GitLuBucket means free backups.

petre4• 10 years ago

It's really easy to use and it has builtin help like mercurial. No need to read man pages. We use it for all our projects. I also use it for tracking config changes in /etc.

pablasso• 10 years ago

How is `git init` or `hg init` harder than maintaining different versions of your code in separate folders?

carterehsmith5• 10 years ago

The fact that you created both an SCM, and a RDBMS, kind of forces the question:

Does Fossil have something like 'rollback'?

If not, would it not be good to have your standard SQL COMMIT/ROLLBACK semantics in an SCM?

I mean, sometimes you do something with your SCM that you immediately regret. Like, you do a 'pull' expecting that perhaps a couple files will be changed, and instead you get a screenful of statuses, errors and whatnots.

Ooops! So you look at what you typed, and turns out you were in a wrong branch, or you should have used 'pull x y' or whatever.

In any case, what you want to do now, is to 'roll back' ('undo') the last command.

Now, in SQL, when you make a mistake, you say 'rollback' and everything is good.

But in a typical SCM, either you cannot do it at all, or it is nontrivial. E.g. in Git, the way to 'undo' depends on the command that you are undoing. Sometimes it is 'revert', sometimes 'reset ^XX~xx' or 'abort', etc etc, clearly not optimal.

Is there an SCM that does that?

isxek2• 10 years ago

Mercurial has a 'rollback' command, which they've marked as deprecated a few months (years?) ago, but you can still use it when you reach a tight spot.

petre4• 10 years ago

Fossil does have an undo command but that doesn't work on commits (checkin). It works on update and revert. Also thete is no rebase to edit the history. Once you commit it's there. You just mark the bad commit as a mistake or commit changes in the following checkin. Stuff never gets deleted from the repo but there is a scrub command. All of this encourages one to commit responsibly.

amenghra• 10 years ago

`git reflog` almost always works. You can end up losing data when you have changes to untracked files and you do something like `git clean`.

wyoung211• 10 years ago

Does Fossil have something like 'rollback'?

Yes, but not like you mean. A commit is made using a SQLite transaction, so if any part of the commit process fails, it will roll the Fossil repo DB back to its prior state, preventing DB corruption. If you're synchronizing to a remote repository, a failure on the remote also rolls back changes to the local copy, too.

As for rolling back an already committed change, even DBMSes don't work like that. A Fossil commit is the same as SQL COMMIT: the transaction is committed now, and can't be backed out without a subsequent modification.

That said, a common way to get the effect you want with Fossil is to mark the bad commit as the start of a new branch, then resume work on the previously-damaged branch. Rather than delete history, this just pushes it off to the side, as a failed branch.

This does mean that if you make a bad commit, then make two more good commits on top of it, that moving the bad commit to an "ignored" branch will also move the two subsequent commits. However, Fossil also has a cherrypick feature that would let you apply the two good commits to the good branch.

You can sum Fossil vs Git up this way, in this regard: Git remembers what you should have done, Fossil remembers what you actually did.

i_feel_great• 10 years ago

"My intent is to continue personally supporting and maintaining Fossil for at least three more decades."

Good to hear. This instill confidence in me for my continued use of both Fossil and the reason for its existence, SQLite. Thank you.

e12e7• 10 years ago

I had hoped to use Fossil for a new class I'm teaching, but ended up using a combination of gogs (and git).

The web UI is great, and the bundled wiki/bug tracking works fine - but I never could get anonymous push/user registration to work smoothly enough for my needs (we're on a LAN, currently with bring-your-own-device and no central ldap/ad etc).

If it wasn't a group of 27 complete beginners (on Windows), I might have started people out with the basics of ssh and key generation - but in the end gogs had an easier start-up: single binary for me to deploy on a server, and git and vscode available for Windows via http://scoop.sh (as is Fossil :-)).

In the end things worked out - we spent more time on work process, the usual fight with git for a sane workflow (mercurial, Fossil and gitless all make it a bit easier to clone/branch/merge/push than git does. I really don't want too think to much when I rebase, and I don't want to detach my head).

The upside is that gogs is closer to the git/github workflow with git as the vcs tool and Web based "pull requests" -- which for better or worse has become standard.

And it became an opportunity to show that project management really is about people, communication, cooperation and process - not the tools.

SQLite2• 10 years ago

I never could get anonymous push/user registration to work smoothly....

We are always trying to make Fossil better. Can you explain what you mean by "anonymous push/user registeration" and provide more information on why it was a problem for you? Private email to drh@sqlite.org is ok for this.

nomadbyte5• 10 years ago

Version control debates, why??

I think everyone agreed that having an SCM on a project is a must. Everyone most likely is using some SCM already, often-times the choice is made by someone else upstairs or in the history. Git, bzr, hg, svn, TFS (ahem) -- you've just got to use what you've got.

HOWEVER, you may just as well use an SCM that is more __optimal__ for your development style, say, frequent commits, branching, stashes, private branches and then just pump the completed stages into "official" SCM -- kind of layering the version control.

You can install Git or bzr etc. just for yourself? Good!, but not everyone may have such a policy. Fossil does not require installation, it's a self-contained executable, you may just as well build it from source and use it in your account.

Just as simply, the same project directory may be tracked by Fossil in addition to the whatever is the "official" SCM, the only file it places in working dir is ".fslckout".

I think, there's really no need to debate and pit SCMs against each other -- just use what works for you, your project, well, what fits in your own memory (it's true, Fossil command and options set is very compact, yet potent -- check it out!)

rcarmo• 10 years ago

I've been using Fossil on and off throughout the years, and find it to be a very nice all-in-one solution for personal projects.

Collaborating, however, is an issue due to the prevalence of git (it was a bit easier in the Mercurial days because hg users were used to coexisting with something else).

The biggest advantage for me is having a single file as the repo. Makes it much easier to archive stuff.

jslakro• 10 years ago

What about GitTorrent? https://github.com/cjb/gittorrent

nomadbyte5• 10 years ago

Perhaps another factor for minor popularity of Fossil SCM is a lack of plugins for major IDEs.

I don't believe this should be such an obstacle, as most plugins implement only a part of SCM client features, thus asking you to resort to command-line for certain functions. Still, for a lot of developers the expected interaction with "everything" is through IDE. There seems to be a Git or SVN plugin for every possible IDE, yet Fossil lags in that department.

JetBrains has a nice Fossil plugin (for IDEA); that's about it, nothing for VisualStudio, eclipse, Xcode etc. Catch 22 -- no demand, no plugin.

We faced this with our Qt projects, and went on to develop a Fossil SCM plugin for QtCreator: https://github.com/nomadbyte/qtcreator-plugin-fossil

Not that availability of plugins has to be such a big deal for a SCM adoption, but sure this helps a lot to increase any SCM's visibility and accessibility. In case of Fossil this probably will have to be another community effort.

Fossil: A decentralized version control, bug tracking, and wiki software

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