Fossil versus Git • Hacker News Board

Re: Fossil versus Git

#11

Post by toenail » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 11:58 AM UTC

tecleandor wrote: post #10

bradley13 wrote: post #3

I don't know Fossil. However, the first entry in the comparison table puts me off. "VCS, tickets, wiki, docs, notes, forum, chat, UI, RBAC" I don't want my version control system to be a wiki. Or a chat app, or any of that.

Well, GitHub wiki is integrated too. https://docs.github.com/en/communities/documenting-your-proj...

github isn't git

Re: Fossil versus Git

#12

Post by corbezzoli » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 11:59 AM UTC

tecleandor wrote: post #10

bradley13 wrote: post #3

I don't know Fossil. However, the first entry in the comparison table puts me off. "VCS, tickets, wiki, docs, notes, forum, chat, UI, RBAC" I don't want my version control system to be a wiki. Or a chat app, or any of that.

Well, GitHub wiki is integrated too. https://docs.github.com/en/communities/documenting-your-proj...

GitHub is not git. GitHub’s wiki is actually a whole standalone repository

Re: Fossil versus Git

#13

Post by toenail » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 11:59 AM UTC

bradley13 wrote: post #3

I don't know Fossil. However, the first entry in the comparison table puts me off. "VCS, tickets, wiki, docs, notes, forum, chat, UI, RBAC" I don't want my version control system to be a wiki. Or a chat app, or any of that.

It's a good list actually, and shows what fossil devs value. Which is more often than not something I don't value highly.

Re: Fossil versus Git

#14

Post by rakoo » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 12:08 PM UTC

bradley13 wrote: post #3

I don't know Fossil. However, the first entry in the comparison table puts me off. "VCS, tickets, wiki, docs, notes, forum, chat, UI, RBAC" I don't want my version control system to be a wiki. Or a chat app, or any of that.

That's the thing, fossil isn't merely a VCS, it's a full dev collaboration environment and includes all that is needed

Re: Fossil versus Git

#15

Post by Vinnl » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 12:08 PM UTC

maegul wrote: post #4

bradley13 wrote: post #3

I don't know Fossil. However, the first entry in the comparison table puts me off. "VCS, tickets, wiki, docs, notes, forum, chat, UI, RBAC" I don't want my version control system to be a wiki. Or a chat app, or any of that.

Well, do you use GitHub or an equivalent? The point of this, as the article states: > These additional capabilities are available for Git as 3rd-party add-ons, but with Fossil they are integrated into the design, to the point that it approximates "GitHub-in-a-box. I’ve not used fossil, but I appreciate this idea. Sure, it’s not unixy, but maybe a VCS reasonably demands such features, and today, it’s not as though the…

To clarify the actual benefit: this means that tickets, etc. are also distributed, i.e. available and backed up locally with every contributor, and not dependent on lock-in to a single vendor like GitHub.

Edit: and yes, of course there are downsides as well. It's up to you to weigh them against each other.

Re: Fossil versus Git

#16

Post by helloguillecl » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 12:09 PM UTC

I love git and I find no reason to look for anything else. Most of the complains I hear from git is from people that could not learn its logic.

I think a lot of things could be built on top of git.

Re: Fossil versus Git

#17

Post by prepend » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 12:12 PM UTC

dognotdog wrote: post #2

I keep coming back to fossil again and again, despite git having a huge pull because of the easy publishing and collab on github/gitlab. Just the other day I was starting an exploratory project, and thought: I'll just use git so I can throw this on github later. Well, silly me, it happened to contain some large binary files, and github rejected it, wanting me to use git-lfs for the big files. After half an hour of no…

It is extremely rare that I have a file over 100MB.

I also think it’s one of those situations where if I have a giant binary file in source control “I’m doing it wrong” so git helps me design better.

It’s like in the olden days when you couldn’t put blobs directly in a row so databases made you do your file management yourself instead of just plopping in files.

I like git. I don’t like giant binary files in my commit history. It’s cool that you like fossil, but I don’t see this as a reason for me to use it.

Re: Fossil versus Git

#18

Post by wirrbel » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 12:12 PM UTC

I once tried it and ended up losing the history for some weird reason. Maybe its a fixed bug by now, but if I don't want to use git, I will use mercurial.

Re: Fossil versus Git

#19

Post by rewmie » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 12:15 PM UTC

wirrbel wrote: post #18

I once tried it and ended up losing the history for some weird reason. Maybe its a fixed bug by now, but if I don't want to use git, I will use mercurial.

It's also hard to go through the trouble of onboarding onto a VCS other than Git given a) how ubiquitous it is even and specially in free hosting services, b) Git alternatives don't offer any compelling feature other than contrarian bragging rights for not using Git.

Re: Fossil versus Git

#20

Post by prepend » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 12:15 PM UTC

maegul wrote: post #4

bradley13 wrote: post #3

I don't know Fossil. However, the first entry in the comparison table puts me off. "VCS, tickets, wiki, docs, notes, forum, chat, UI, RBAC" I don't want my version control system to be a wiki. Or a chat app, or any of that.

Well, do you use GitHub or an equivalent? The point of this, as the article states: > These additional capabilities are available for Git as 3rd-party add-ons, but with Fossil they are integrated into the design, to the point that it approximates "GitHub-in-a-box. I’ve not used fossil, but I appreciate this idea. Sure, it’s not unixy, but maybe a VCS reasonably demands such features, and today, it’s not as though the…

I like the “separation of powers” between git and GitHub functions (and gitlab).

It’s nice to be able to start git repos locally and only push to GitHub when I need to.

I also use gitlab quite a bit and it’s so clean to be able to pull from gitlab and push to GitHub, or vice versa. I don’t need any utilities, I don’t need any special workflows.

Git is sort of like a protocol with gitlab, GitHub, and others built on top.

If GitHub owned git then it would be so tightly coupled and suck.

I don’t think a VCS demands features of chat and the others. And the evidence provided by the millions of users seems to support that.

It’s not that chat and wiki are super complicated, it’s just more stuff. Implementing an alarm clock isn’t complicated either, should VCMs have alarm clocks as well?