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Before GitHub

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: Before GitHub

#141

Post by maccard »

jimbosis wrote: post #104
powvans wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone[0] who is working on exactly this right now: https://fossilrepo.io/ I don't think he's got public sign ups turned on yet. Maybe hit him up on the Twitter for more info. [0] - https://x.com/ragelink

There's also "Chisel - Fossil SCM Hosting". "This service is completely free and run because a service like it should exist." https://chiselapp.com/ "All public repositories": https://chiselapp.com/repositories/ I don't know if it has all the GitHub features people may be looking for. Chisel runs on Flint, "The ISC licensed codebase behind http://chiselapp.com .": https://chiselapp.com/user/rkeene/repository/flint/in…

This appears to be down.

Re: Before GitHub

#143

Post by noosphr »

ragelink wrote: post #91
wps wrote: post #21

I am still so salty that Git won out for the average project over Fossil. Sure Git has some performance advantages for massive codebases like the Linux Kernel, but the vast majority of projects will never run into performance limits from their VCS. Fossil’s internal tools (wiki, forum, tickets , etc) are just so useful to have versioned with your code in one file. I use Fossil for all my freelance work and it so easi…

Funny timing — I've been working on a hosted Fossil service to scratch this exact itch. The integrated wiki+forum+tickets+code is killer for small teams, but most people who'd pick Fossil don't actually want to babysit a server. So we host it. Two things I keep coming back to: (1) The "opinionated / small-teams only" critique others have raised in this thread is real, and I think Fossil should own it instead of fight…

Or, hear me out, we learn to host our own shit again and stop giving all our data to $megacorp after the inevitable buyout.

Re: Before GitHub

#145

Post by notpushkin »

> But if projects move to something more akin to self-hosted forges, to their own self-hosted Mercurial or cgit servers, we run the risk of losing things that we don’t want to lose. The code might be distributed in theory, but the social context often is not. Issues, reviews, design discussions, release notes, security advisories, and old tarballs are fragile.

Thankfully, this doesn’t have to be the case – Forgejo imports pretty much everything mentioned. (1) Whether you decide to move to Codeberg or host your own instance, you won’t have to lose the context.

But I definitely agree we should also have a metadata archive of some sort, for both GitHub, Codeberg, and self-hosted projects.

(1): Not sure about code reviews, and you don’t get the security advisories, though I’m sure it can be replicated with a CI workflow somehow?

Re: Before GitHub

#147

Post by zkmon »

SVN (subversion) was working excellent for my team, about 20 yrs back. I never saw sufficient justification for the complexity brought in by Git.

But as I say, New tech invades the world and makes the perfectly working old tech as incompatible, just by changing the world around it. So git became a necessity imposed.

Re: Before GitHub

#148

Post by paganel »

zkmon wrote: post #147

SVN (subversion) was working excellent for my team, about 20 yrs back. I never saw sufficient justification for the complexity brought in by Git. But as I say, New tech invades the world and makes the perfectly working old tech as incompatible, just by changing the world around it. So git became a necessity imposed.

There was a big hype around it (you probably remember it), and around distributed version control, if you weren't using a DVCS you were suddenly seen as an inferior computer programmer and hence your employment opportunities were diminishing. That perspective when it comes to almost all-things programming-related has only accelerated ("if you're not quick to adapt to agentic AI you will lose your cushy job!"), with the recent AI craze the latest example of that.

Re: Before GitHub

#149

Post by notpushkin »

shevy-java wrote: post #125
wps wrote: post #21

I am still so salty that Git won out for the average project over Fossil. Sure Git has some performance advantages for massive codebases like the Linux Kernel, but the vast majority of projects will never run into performance limits from their VCS. Fossil’s internal tools (wiki, forum, tickets , etc) are just so useful to have versioned with your code in one file. I use Fossil for all my freelance work and it so easi…

I think this shows that you do not consider all build-up options here. Let me explain that. Could something like github be made with fossil, aka fossilhub? I believe the answer is ... in theory yes, in practice no. So this already means, if correct, the comparison between git and fossil is incorrect here. Fossilhub would not have dominated; git + github on the other hand did. Again, in theory a fossilhub could win ov…

> in theory yes, in practice no

Why? I don’t see any practical reason.

Re: Before GitHub

#150

Post by zoobab »

"We Need an Archive"

Before we had FTP, which made easy to mirror stuff with "lftp mirror -p".

HTML is not good for archiving.

We have to rethink those protocols so that mirroring is made easy, and "git clone" is not an answer sorry.

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