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Fossil SCM

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Re: Fossil SCM

#101

Post by sqrt17 »

rbehrends wrote: post #78
wirrbel wrote: post #8

Anyone using it for development? What is your experience?

I'm using it for a number of personal projects and a couple of projects with a small number of collaborators. Advantages: The entire repository is a single file (SQLite database), which makes some things easy (backup, putting it on a USB drive, mailing it to another person) and has support for tickets and a wiki built-in. It is simple, but feature-complete for the use cases it is intended for. Disadvantages: The comm…

Numerical version numbers in Mercurial are a good thing until they start to differ in different repository copies, after which you have to educate everyone to refer to versions by their hash instead of the numeric version

Re: Fossil SCM

#102

Post by vonuebelgarten »

rkeene2 wrote: post #50
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.

Fossil's emphasis on recording history is very helpful. Additionally, the fact that the bug tracker, wiki, and technotes/milestones are all distributed as part of the same database is very helpful. Unversioned artifacts have been added recently, which are helpful for storing and optionally transmitting build artifacts associated with the repository. No multi-stage commit pipeline is much easier conceptually -- mostly…

>No multi-stage commit pipeline is much easier conceptually -- mostly I just want to commit the changes I made to my repository and automatically sync upstream.

But forcing this approach precludes you of, for example, easily splitting your existing changes in two commits if required. If changes to the same file are to be committed separately, a non-zero amount of copy-pasting, resetting, temporary files, etc. will be required.

I see Git's separation of concerns of a strict superset for your use case. Just add an alias "git commit -a; git pull; git push".

Re: Fossil SCM

#103

Post by throwawayish »

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…

> 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.

This is more up to git being horribly leaky about all it's internal implementation details. I'm not a git developer, and not even that great a user, but I know about trees and indices and refs and refspecs and packs and reachability and objects and merge drivers and smudge and clean and diamonds and countless other details that I feel should be encapsulated way better. git also has next to none documentation of these concepts.

Re: Fossil SCM

#104

Post by rbehrends »

sqrt17 wrote: post #101
rbehrends wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using it for a number of personal projects and a couple of projects with a small number of collaborators. Advantages: The entire repository is a single file (SQLite database), which makes some things easy (backup, putting it on a USB drive, mailing it to another person) and has support for tickets and a wiki built-in. It is simple, but feature-complete for the use cases it is intended for. Disadvantages: The comm…

Numerical version numbers in Mercurial are a good thing until they start to differ in different repository copies, after which you have to educate everyone to refer to versions by their hash instead of the numeric version

1. You can use the Bzr approach instead, which has universally valid revision numbers.

2. Even local revision numbering has useful applications, such as annotate/blame, where numbers (unlike hashes) follow a chronological ordering. It is still better than not having them at all.

Re: Fossil SCM

#105

Post by throwawayish »

oblio wrote: post #4

My god, they've updated the CSS. It used to be quite a bit uglier. Now it's not GitHub, but it's definitely lighter on the eyes. Nice to see - I think that good tools should have UIs that at least come close to the quality of their engineering.

I remember the old page / look and I feel like that one had much more character. This kind of design is very generic and has been for quite some years now.

Re: Fossil SCM

#107

Post by david-given »

cmrx64 wrote: post #5

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.

Yeah, I feel exactly the same way. For me, the turning point was discovering hg-git, which allows me to use hg as a git client; so I get all the network effects of GitHub but without needing to, you know, actually have to use git.

But I still miss Fossil. I like the simplicity, and the feature set (although last I looked it still didn't do rename tracking), and the immutable nature of the database... I particularly liked the way that it's also a webserver. Being able to have your project web in a branch and when you want to make it live you just atomically update a tag is beautiful.

The wiki I never used much, preferring to use manually version-controlled markdown files instead. The bug tracker... actually works pretty well, but it needs a lot of setup before it looks and feels anything other than ropy. (Although this may have changed. When I stopped following fossil it was undergoing a big UI overhaul.)

If it supported bidirectional git sync, I'd switch back in a heartbeat.

Update: having just fetched the latest version from Debian, there's lots of new stuff. 'fossil fusefs' lets you mount the repository as a read-only filesystem, which is cool. There's better support for private branches. There's a monster machine-readable interface based around json data packets. You can now have unversioned but synced files? Possibly this is for big binaries where you don't care about history? There's a 'fossil stash'. There's full-text search. You can export bundles of changesets so you can pass them around (pull requests, basically).

Oh, and 'fossil praise' and 'fossil blame' are synonyms.

It looks like there is support for git bidirectional sync, but it looks a bit hacky:

https://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil/artifact/027298d991dec3a7

Re: Fossil SCM

#108

Post by rkeene2 »

sytse wrote: post #83
pestaa wrote: post #2

GitLab contributors, please take note. Fossil's UI is very fast and the navigation is intuitive and discoverable. I know it's on the roadmap, but it is so often an afterthought.

Thanks, we're indeed working on making the UI faster in https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/06/vue-big-plan/ I've clicked around in the UI of Fossil. It indeed is very fast. About the navigation: 1. Fossil has home, GitLab has a hamburger menu with different top level view, Fossil doesn't seem to account for multiple project but I'm probably overlooking something. 2. Fossil timeline seems similar to GitLab Activity http…

The Fossil timeline view is helpful because of the actual line(s) that are drawn for each branch -- it's a visualization tool rather than a log of commits. This seems to be lacking in the linked "GitLab Activity" view.

Also handy is the Fossil timeline includes more than just commits, it includes Commits, Wiki changes, Change artifacts, Technotes, and ticket creation/updates so you can get a sense of how things happened in time.

Also, Fossil supports serving multiple repositories -- it's just a matter of how you start it, but since it's all integrated there's not a lot of reason to use that functionality usually. ChiselApp uses Flint ( https://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/flint/ ) to handle the administrative task of creating repositories, taking in repositories as uploads, resetting repository passwords if you have access to the ChiselApp dashboard, and performing scheduled pulls.

Re: Fossil SCM

#109

Post by pythonaut_16 »

sytse wrote: post #93
e12e wrote: post #80

I tried using Fossil as a DVCS/Project management tool for a class I'm currently teaching - but in the end I couldn't quite figure out self-registration combined with allowing authenticated push in a way that worked for ~25 students without needing much instruction/hand-holding. If I'd had some form of user-database already, I could probably have gotten it to work with a proxy in front - but for now I've ended up usi…

Glad to hear you're considering using GitLab. We have an importer for Gitea but not for Gogs https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/importing/README.html so I think you might consider a batch import https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/raketasks/import.html

I just started using this yesterday!

I setup a personal Gitea instance on Linode, but wanted to make sure I could easily back up my repos in case I ever lose access or stop maintaining my personal Linode server.

Gitlab made it easy to setup all of my repos to mirror and automatically update from my Gitea daily.

(One slight bug, Gitlab does seem to always say the repos failed to import, even when they're successful)

Thanks for the helpful feature!

Re: Fossil SCM

#110

Post by rkeene2 »

fundamental wrote: post #65
wirrbel wrote: post #8

Anyone using it for development? What is your experience?

I started to use it for one large project a few months back as I liked the idea of having an integrated issue tracker/docs/wiki/etc. In the end I wasn't a huge fan of fossil overall as its implementation felt clunky and I reverted back to git. I'd say most of it's problems can be attributed to a lack of polish due to the much smaller user base compared to other options like git.

What issues did you have ? Fossil is usually pretty easy to cleanup any dangling wires, if they can be coherently identified to people who may not see them in the same way as you.
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