I would like to introduce you lovely OpenSource Lovers to a GIT-Alternative called FOSSIL that I also stumbled upon because of this Blog.<br> It’s basically opensource Github-in-a-box which means it’s an SCM with:
- Bug-tracker
- Ticketting-system
- Forum
- Wiki-system
- even a Chat-functionality
- Has built-in GUI
- Also has a Web-Server
- Self-Hostable like Gitea/Forgejo
& the best part it’s all in ONE STANDALONE FILE!!! which is extremely lightweight which you can copy to your $PATH & works even in crappy internet. how cool is that!!
However this tool supports a completely different style of development in FOSS called the “Cathedral-Style” whereas GIT suports a “Bazaar-Style”<br> The person behind Fossil is the creator of SQLite, <u>Dr.Richard Hipp</u> & they even made other projects to support Fossil like a PIC-Like language called PikChr<br> Well just in case; here’s a list of difference between Git vs Fossil<br> & guess what!! they even have a hosting service called CHISEL
Listen; Just check it out & use it for fun in your spare time even with the flaws it has (& Try out Darcs & Pijul as well)
What about git needs replacement?
Something new is new, and apparently that’s all tha-- SQUIRREL!
Seems like a historic artefact to me as well. And one of their mentioned points was “no sync via http” which even for 2006 makes me… hesitant.
And their history section ends in 2007, couldn’t find a feature comparison in their quick start guide.
Git is far from user friendly but that’s a design consideration from a decentralized architecture. Fossil will have the same considerations. People need to learn how to use Git.
The problem is there’s only one person who really knows how to use it: Linus.
I’m so fuckin tired of hearing x is user unfriendly, it’s not intuitive enough.
Like fuckin yeah. Sometimes you have to actually learn something new to use something new when I first started driving it wasn’t user friendly. I had to learn how to do it
does he? i was under the impression that linus considers it just as stupid as everybody else and its existence is somewhat unsettlingly like a separate organism that lives in our collective brain activity…
It doesn’t have remote/server capabilities for one
Isn’t that by design? I believe the intention was to offload that capability to an existing solution, usually ssh.
Yeah & for that we have to deal withe Dependency hell Look at the size of Fossil & compare
What? Since when has ssh been a negative? Regardless of VC if you work on remote machines you need SSH, fullstop. I won’t take you seriously if you think otherwise sorry.
Not sure what that means. Never once heard of git being a problem or large in size. Further, it’s extremely widely supported.
Do you live in a world where storage is expensive or rare? Because I more or less forgot the meaning of deleting files.
Also git does support the git protocol as a server if you really need it.
I must be missing whan you mean by remote/server since pull, fetch, push… All interact with remote copies of the repo.
Darcs does not require a central server, and works perfectly in offline mode.
Git can be used that way too. Am I missing something?
No, you are not. People regularly equate Git and GitHub, though.
no, this is exactly what git does
So Git has a ticketting system ?
Am I missing something?
No and, in fact, this was (and still is) a selling point of Git over the alternatives (e.g. Subversion) available at the time that required you to “check out” some code and no one else could check out/modify that code while you had it checked out.
dont forget about jujutsu
Since jujutsu is Git-compatible it has very much replaced Git for me and is what I’m using for everything now. Its workflow is so good and miles ahead of Git.
I was trying out Pijul for a while before that and while it has a lot of great ideas and has a lot of potential due to the way its foundations work its interface is way too janky right now and missing features and nothing I’ve reported or the many changes I’ve submitted have been fixed/pulled since March. I’d really like it to be good but alas…
Fossil is more like a Jira replacement, and its built by one person with a severe case of NIH. Not necessarily a bad thing but I lived through it with Ubuntu, not really a fan of this philosophy.
“NIH”?
I think “Not Invented Here”. Meaning he wants to build everything himself from scratch despite there being alternatives he can use instead.
E.g.: Building your own httprequest library rather than using the existing one which is good enough.
That makes sense, thank you.
With that attitude maybe we shouldn’t invent at all Why not go all the way
“To make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe.”
I think you’re reacting to the wrong person as I didn’t make the NIH claim, but merely explained its meaning. :)
this is a very childish way to react, you ok?
Not Invented Here, the urge to rebuild the wheel because someone else did it.
I’ve worked with NIH VCS. Never again lol, I’ll stick to git until something else becomes so universally recognized that people en masse start jumping ship.
Because of Ubuntu we get to have “Just works distros” & Fossil has features Git doesn’t
- open-source
- Ticketing
- Cathedral-style coding isn’t very Open-Source, if you believe the man who wrote the book and coined the term.
- it’s okay to post your own words instead of drunkenly jamming HTML into Markdown.
I like Markdown so I’m gonna use it
Spent 5 minutes on the website and couldn’t get a peek at their code… The most fundamental thing, IMO.
fossil is made by the sqlite devs, for development of sqlite. this is not some amateur operation.
also, it’s by the sqlite people, so expect the code to be… odd.
& The code behind Linux isn’t ? People back then did some REAL sorcery with coding
back then? both codebases are fully modern. its more that sqlite uses a style that differs from the accepted norm quite a bit. that, and they don’t accept contributions.
Yeah it’s the cathedral-style, Opensource but closed contributions as in no PRs
Which is not really open now is it.
it’s not the most intuitive interface but there you go: https://fossil-scm.org/home/tree?name=src
Wow C, CSS and JS files at the same level. You don’t see this every day
There are tabs above like a browser
deleted by creator
Look at the bottom
Learned fossil in college and I intensely disliked it
Why ? As in the intense dislike ?
Didn’t like mixing issue tracking with vcs. I also didn’t like any VCS hahaha, I was just writing shit in literally notepad
I really like the idea of using a relation db to track change history. It removes so much weirdness and quirkiness that git has. You just have regular SQL queries you can use to go through history and ask questions about the state of the repo. I also like that it’s immutable so you don’t have to worry about things like rebasing and other ways you can fuck up history in git. The problems solved by mucking with history largely go away when you can query the db with a rich syntax.
Same, really love the idea of backing history with a proper database, and the immutability. git rebasing was a mistake.
Rebasing is for advanced git users who knows what he’s doing. If one does not know how to use it or not feeling comfortable in general, he can happily take his own code and try to merge it into the latest version instead. No one is judging.
For the rest of the world where projects are open-source, more often than not, not those projects inside a corporation where only the team lead is making decisions, it’s a powerful tool to settle down conflicts sort out history.
One does not need to change the history again, if he’s not comfortable with it. Just use git as if it’s centralised VCS like SVN. No big deal. In fact, in corporations you do. There only needs to be one person who manages the repository.
I get why it exists, but yeah it’s more trouble than it’s worth in most cases.
How do you cleanly base your local changes against a new upstream version? Merges?
I love Fossil and use it for all my personal projects! I use syncthing to keep my all my repositories updated across devices and it works great!
I do wish I better understood either self-hosting or that there were more web hosts though, it would make collaboration easier when I feel like sharing. A git(hub) bridge could do it too I guess…
This seems really cool!! And I love to see alternatives to git. But @[email protected], you need to cool it on the replies. You’re making the Fossil community look hostile by association.
I’m not a part of the fossil community, also when none of the people here bother to properly check out the website & call it Ancient or see the why behind the tool & it’s development philosphy Yeah that pisses me off (So yeah I’ll “cool it” but it makes the GIT-community look like hostile hive)
