Fossil is the SCM I always wish I were using, but for the benefit of external collaborators, I stick with Git and GitLab (previously, GitHub). Fossil is a lovely, small piece of software that does exactly what I want in a nice and simple way. It's fast and uses SQLite for everything, making it easy to programmatically extend it and munge its internal data.
SQLite usage makes me wonder how will it behave over time with millions of commits. Also makes me wonder how will it handle distribution.
Fossil SCM
21–30 of 147 posts
Re: Fossil SCM
#22No/manual rebase sounds awful
Genuinely curious: Why do you need rebasing? I'm mostly a mercurial person, where doing a rebase is highly discouraged and nontrivial. After all these years on mercurial, I've never found a need to do it. Why is it so popular amongst git users?
If you like a readable commit history, rebase is useful to reorder and squash unnecessary commits. Some repositories, like Rails have a lot of merge commits. Why should I have to read through them? Also, all kinds of failed tests may have been developed in a feature-branch during month-long development.
Interactive rebasing lets you avoid that mess, I don't think it is that complicated. Mercurial uses the same underlying data structures, so I don't understand how rebasing can be more complicated on Mercurial than Git.
Re: Fossil SCM
#23No/manual rebase sounds awful
Genuinely curious: Why do you need rebasing? I'm mostly a mercurial person, where doing a rebase is highly discouraged and nontrivial. After all these years on mercurial, I've never found a need to do it. Why is it so popular amongst git users?
I end up using it when fixing up local changes which had broken due to upstream modifications.
It's generally not seen as very good to send things upstream that conflict with existing changes, and including merges (from master, primarily) in upstream submissions is frowned upon.
When I was using mercurial, I ended up using the mq extension [1] to provide a similar work flow. I actually prefer mq's work flow to rebasing in git (simplifies some things when maintaining a set of changes), but the programs like that for git are lacking (I've tried guilt and quilt).
Re: Fossil SCM
#24Veracity is the only other SCM I know of that takes the distribute everything approach of Fossil. Are there any others?
Re: Fossil SCM
#25It's good to see so many SCM systems showing up. But it makes me wonder how many of them can actually work on GBs of codebase with over 1000 of programmers checking in on daily basis. I my experience most of SCMs are fine for small to medium projects, but they go down with crawling speeds and sometimes even not working at all when it goes large scale.
I tried to ask a couple of days ago if anybody has started using bitkeeper lately but either only one person saw it or only one other person found it interesting:
Re: Fossil SCM
#26No/manual rebase sounds awful
From the git vs fossil faq:
"Because of its emphasis on recording history exactly as it happened, rather than as we would have liked it to happen, Fossil deliberately does not provide a "rebase" command. One can rebase manually in Fossil, with sufficient perserverence, but it not something that can be done with a single command."
https://www.fossil-scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.w...
Re: Fossil SCM
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuinely curious: Why do you need rebasing? I'm mostly a mercurial person, where doing a rebase is highly discouraged and nontrivial. After all these years on mercurial, I've never found a need to do it. Why is it so popular amongst git users?
If you like a readable commit history, rebase is useful to reorder and squash unnecessary commits. Some repositories, like Rails have a lot of merge commits. Why should I have to read through them? Also, all kinds of failed tests may have been developed in a feature-branch during month-long development. Interactive rebasing lets you avoid that mess, I don't think it is that complicated. Mercurial uses the same underl…
> I don't understand how rebasing can be more complicated on Mercurial than Git.
It's more complicated in the sense that there isn't a nice command for it. You still can do it by doing multiple lower-level steps, or installing an extension that makes it nicer.
Re: Fossil SCM
#28I dont see the point of Fossil, I looked into it. The commands arent that much easier to understand. If I'm using an SCM anyway and I still need to use a cmd line and I still need to memorize commands then I might just as well use git. And Git has Guis now.
Git has had several (first- and third-party) GUIs for a long time...
Re: Fossil SCM
#29I dont see the point of Fossil, I looked into it. The commands arent that much easier to understand. If I'm using an SCM anyway and I still need to use a cmd line and I still need to memorize commands then I might just as well use git. And Git has Guis now.
If for nothing else then at least some people like me find it awesome that some people can still put all this into a small standalone and make it work nicely under multiple operating systems.
Re: Fossil SCM
#30Anyone using it for development? What is your experience?
I use fossil for all my projects. It's very lightweight and almost set it and forget it system. Remarkable.