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Before GitHub

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: Before GitHub

#91

Post by ragelink »

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 fighting it. The 5,000-engineer monorepo market is a solved problem (Git won). Fossil should own the 1-50 person bracket — where having issues, wiki, forum, and code in one self-contained, syncable SQLite file is a huge unfair advantage.

(2) AI agents are a brand-new reason to look at Fossil that didn't exist when Git won. Every repo is a queryable SQLite file. An agent reads tickets + wiki + code + history with one SELECT — not 47 GraphQL calls and a rate limit. RAG and MCP setups against the repo become trivial.

We're stuck on the name (fossilforge vs fossilhub). If you have an opinion: https://fossilhub.io | https://fossilforge.io — vote, get early access.

The self-hosted side is already shipping at fossilrepo.io if you'd rather run your own.

--- Disclosure: founder, so grain of salt accordingly.

Re: Before GitHub

#92

Post by tomnipotent »

Lammy wrote: post #41
mhi3 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with this. Github has existed for years and one of the reasons developers trust it is that they never monetized their "archival" work yet (TBD with all the new Copilot features). The alternative would be many sites, each one of them with their own DMCA rules. What would be the better alternative?

Why are you thinking in terms of “sites”? I was imagining something more like a GitTorrent.

> something more like a GitTorrent

Still dependent on centralized trackers. Same story with every useful package manager, there's always a middleman.

Re: Before GitHub

#94

Post by thayne »

conartist6 wrote: post #53
MeetingsBrowser wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your username is con artist lol

Yes, Hi! I'm Conrad.

I'm not sure if your aware, but in American English, "con artist" is another term for a scammer. Someone who does "cons", short for "confidence tricks" (or "confidence schemes") where you gain someone's confidence in order to take advantage of them in some way, usually financial fraud.

Re: Before GitHub

#95

Post by conartist6 »

thayne wrote: post #94
conartist6 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Hi! I'm Conrad.

I'm not sure if your aware, but in American English, "con artist" is another term for a scammer. Someone who does "cons", short for "confidence tricks" (or "confidence schemes") where you gain someone's confidence in order to take advantage of them in some way, usually financial fraud.

Yes I'm aware, I grew up in a college town in rural Pennsylvania. I chose the name when I signed up for Neopets uhhhh 20 years ago now.

Re: Before GitHub

#96

Post by fragmede »

conartist6 wrote: post #95
thayne wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if your aware, but in American English, "con artist" is another term for a scammer. Someone who does "cons", short for "confidence tricks" (or "confidence schemes") where you gain someone's confidence in order to take advantage of them in some way, usually financial fraud.

Yes I'm aware, I grew up in a college town in rural Pennsylvania. I chose the name when I signed up for Neopets uhhhh 20 years ago now.

The best time to have chosen a new name was 20 years ago. The second best time to choose one is now.

Re: Before GitHub

#97

Post by jpeeler »

I was hoping that by now we would have an up and coming DVCS replacement that functioned as a "github in a box" (pretty sure fossil has been described as that, but it's too much on the cathedral side). Being able to mirror an entire project though version control would significantly help with mirroring if we go back to a decentralized world. Maybe going back to decentralized project hosting is just another pendulum swing similar to how compute moved to the cloud...

Re: Before GitHub

#98

Post by Lammy »

tomnipotent wrote: post #92
Lammy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you thinking in terms of “sites”? I was imagining something more like a GitTorrent.

> something more like a GitTorrent Still dependent on centralized trackers. Same story with every useful package manager, there's always a middleman.

BitTorrent has supported trackerless torrents for twenty entire years :p https://github.com/sparkslabs/kamaelia/blob/master/Sketches/...

Re: Before GitHub

#99

Post by vbernat »

simonw wrote: post #2

I absolutely loved Trac. Getting a Trac setup as step 1 in starting a new open source project was just an unbelievable amount of friction. Fun fact: Django is still running on Trac today, and has been for more than 20 years now: https://code.djangoproject.com/timeline (I was not involved in setting that one up, though it's possible I helped get the private Trac that pre-dated it running, I honestly can't remember!)

I've switched to GitHub from Trac because of spam. Despite using Akismet and bayesian filters, on a small instance, there were still several spam tickets if you didn't require an account (for the details, https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2011-migrating-to-github). I am a bit amazed that Trac still exists and is maintained today.

Re: Before GitHub

#100

Post by alfg »

psychoslave wrote: post #31
alastairp wrote: post #25

> What GitHub Gave Us To me one of the clear things that GitHub gave us was a structure around a person rather than a project. To me it felt liberating to quickly create a repository attached to my name than it was to go through the (what felt to me) very serious process of coming up with a project name and reserving it on sourceforge just to get a cvs or svn repository (along with website, mailing lists, issue track…

[flagged]

Very strange take. A lot of software is built on trust and the people behind it. Hence why the social aspect of Github was so important to a lot of open source software.
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