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Fossil SCM

fossil-scm.org

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Re: Fossil SCM

#51

Post by bananaoomarang »

bachmeier wrote: post #40

Here's my story. I wanted to use version control on my research projects, but asking my collaborators to use Git was too much. They were supposed to figure out a staging area and pushing and pulling and then they'd get a bizarre error about a merge conflict. They'd do a search and Stack Overflow told them to type in an incantation. The repo is messed up, the collaborator goes back to email, and I'm left sorting throu…

This is a good point. I think once developers learn Git (or as much as they need to use), then they forget how esoteric the the cli tool is.

I think a lot of devs have the attitude that a tool being more difficult to use makes it a powerful one (cf. Vim/Emacs), whereas most people are happy when tool does the three things they need to get from a=>b, b=>c, a=>c.

Maybe this is to do with our desire for everything to be as flexible as the programming languages we write in. Most people don't view computers as blank slates ready to do their bidding, but as systems where the behaviour of a few facets is to be memorised without concerns for their mechanics or abstractions. This is probably one of the reasons that mobile software is seen as so easy to use, since it obscures/abstracts elements like the filesystem from the user.

Glad to hear Fossil is friendlier.

EDIT: I should say that I am a heavy user of Vim, Emacs, Git and Arch Linux, I am just saying that these tools often require a large up front investment, and this can be detrimental as well as sensible.

Re: Fossil SCM

#52

Post by lvh »

pebblexe wrote: post #45

I wish it supported AJAX and the client UI was decoupled from the repository.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean with "client UI being decoupled from the repository". Wouldn't everything you do in an SCM necessarily be coupled to a repository?

Re: Fossil SCM

#55

Post by rbehrends »

jjirsa wrote: post #3

No/manual rebase sounds awful

1. Fossil is designed around having auditable history.

2. Fossil can change meta-information (commit messages, tags, branch names) after the fact. Those changes also leave an audit trail.

3. Fossil has features that handle certain use cases for rebasing (private branches, fossil stash snapshot, etc.). If you absolutely need to, fossil purge can be used to edit local history and the shun mechanism can be used to (e.g.) extirpate sensitive information that was shared by accident.

4. Extensive use of rebasing to produce a linear history is a Git-ism , largely due the fact that in Git, history is a soup of anonymous commit objects that is difficult to visualize. Other version control systems that allow you to label and structure history have less need for this.

Re: Fossil SCM

#56

Post by lvh »

djsumdog wrote: post #42
simplehuman wrote: post #13

Surprised to see no LDAP support. http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/tktview?name=ec667f74f8

From what I can tell from the issue, they're suggesting the load balancer or server you put in front of Fossil to do the authentication (which can hit LDAP/AD). Sure you can't do fine grained control or permissions, but for small shops/groups it seems like a good starting point.

You can sort-of hack it together offline, in that LDAP can be the source of identity (via REMOTE_USER + frontend, as you mention), and that Fossil has a reasonably fine-grained permissions model that you can (offline) sync from LDAP.

Re: Fossil SCM

#57

Post by vkou »

bananaoomarang wrote: post #51
bachmeier wrote: post #40

Here's my story. I wanted to use version control on my research projects, but asking my collaborators to use Git was too much. They were supposed to figure out a staging area and pushing and pulling and then they'd get a bizarre error about a merge conflict. They'd do a search and Stack Overflow told them to type in an incantation. The repo is messed up, the collaborator goes back to email, and I'm left sorting throu…

This is a good point. I think once developers learn Git (or as much as they need to use), then they forget how esoteric the the cli tool is. I think a lot of devs have the attitude that a tool being more difficult to use makes it a powerful one (cf. Vim/Emacs), whereas most people are happy when tool does the three things they need to get from a=>b, b=>c, a=>c. Maybe this is to do with our desire for everything to be…

As a developer who hasn't learned git beyond the superficial, I second the notion that it is extremely esoteric.

Re: Fossil SCM

#58

Post by [deleted] »

bananaoomarang wrote: post #51
bachmeier wrote: post #40

Here's my story. I wanted to use version control on my research projects, but asking my collaborators to use Git was too much. They were supposed to figure out a staging area and pushing and pulling and then they'd get a bizarre error about a merge conflict. They'd do a search and Stack Overflow told them to type in an incantation. The repo is messed up, the collaborator goes back to email, and I'm left sorting throu…

This is a good point. I think once developers learn Git (or as much as they need to use), then they forget how esoteric the the cli tool is. I think a lot of devs have the attitude that a tool being more difficult to use makes it a powerful one (cf. Vim/Emacs), whereas most people are happy when tool does the three things they need to get from a=>b, b=>c, a=>c. Maybe this is to do with our desire for everything to be…

[deleted]

Re: Fossil SCM

#59

Post by rkeene2 »

msingle wrote: post #48
stonemetal wrote: post #24

Veracity is the only other SCM I know of that takes the distribute everything approach of Fossil. Are there any others?

haven't seen [veracity]( http://veracity-scm.com/ ) mentioned in a while! I always thought the idea of using JS as the built in scripting/templating language was ahead of its time.

Fossil has TH1 -- pretty much a stripped down Tcl, but can also (optionally) call out to full Tcl.

Re: Fossil SCM

#60

Post by lvh »

hubert123 wrote: post #9

I 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.

The git UI is not necessarily consistent or pleasant. In many cases, this has improved over the years, but plenty of stuff still only makes sense via rote memorization, not because it actually matches what you're trying to do.

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

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