I would like to introduce you lovely OpenSource Lovers to a GIT-Alternative called FOSSIL that I also stumbled upon because of this Blog.<br> It's basically opensource Github-in-a-box which means it's an SCM with:
Bug-tracker
Ticketting-system
Forum
Wiki-system
even a Chat-functionality
Has built-in GUI
Also has a Web-Server
Self-Hostable like Gitea/Forgejo
& the best part it's all in ONE STANDALONE FILE!!! which is extremely lightweight which you can copy to your $PATH & works even in crappy internet. how cool is that!!
However this tool supports a completely different style of development in FOSS called the "Cathedral-Style" whereas GIT suports a "Bazaar-Style"<br>
The person behind Fossil is the creator of SQLite, <u>Dr.Richard Hipp</u> & they even made other projects to support Fossil like a PIC-Like language called PikChr<br>
Well just in case; here's a list of difference between Git vs Fossil<br>
& guess what!! they even have a hosting service called CHISEL
Listen; Just check it out & use it for fun in your spare time even with the flaws it has (& Try out Darcs & Pijul as well)
Git is far from user friendly but that's a design consideration from a decentralized architecture. Fossil will have the same considerations. People need to learn how to use Git.
The problem is there's only one person who really knows how to use it: Linus.
I'm so fuckin tired of hearing x is user unfriendly, it's not intuitive enough.
Like fuckin yeah. Sometimes you have to actually learn something new to use something new when I first started driving it wasn't user friendly. I had to learn how to do it
I remember Linus saying in an interview that he'd only really been involved in git for the first 6 months or so and that the other devs had managed it without him since then. This makes sense - Linus's creations aren't successful because he's the only person who understands them, they're successful because there are so many other collaborators on them.
does he? i was under the impression that linus considers it just as stupid as everybody else and its existence is somewhat unsettlingly like a separate organism that lives in our collective brain activity..
Darcs came out in 2003—Git in 2005. It was novel at the time compared to the alternatives. Darcs started as alternative to CSV & Subversion, not Git. Unlike Git it works on patches, not snapshots which has advantanges in merge conflicts.
No and, in fact, this was (and still is) a selling point of Git over the alternatives (e.g. Subversion) available at the time that required you to "check out" some code and no one else could check out/modify that code while you had it checked out.
Since jujutsu is Git-compatible it has very much replaced Git for me and is what I'm using for everything now. Its workflow is so good and miles ahead of Git.
I was trying out Pijul for a while before that and while it has a lot of great ideas and has a lot of potential due to the way its foundations work its interface is way too janky right now and missing features and nothing I've reported or the many changes I've submitted have been fixed/pulled since March. I'd really like it to be good but alas...
The compatibility with Git means it is ultimately shackled to the design decisions fundamental to Git which require hacky workarounds. The maker of Pijul has pointed out some of the fundamental ways it can never handle patches is the manner of Darcs/Pijul, but I am not in the position to pull some of these quotes.
I would rather see revolution over evolution, & the weird ties to Google & hosting the project Microsoft GitHub rub me wrong.
Darcs is sort of like Pijul before Pijul. It is a little slower, but might not even affect you at your project size, but what it has instead is a longer history with more tooling & support—on the CLI, support from package managers, forge options. It ends up being my preferred option just for this reason even if Pijul has better performance, handles binary files, & the identity server is novel.
Fossil is more like a Jira replacement, and its built by one person with a severe case of NIH. Not necessarily a bad thing but I lived through it with Ubuntu, not really a fan of this philosophy.
I've worked with NIH VCS. Never again lol, I'll stick to git until something else becomes so universally recognized that people en masse start jumping ship.
This - cathedral style development absolutely is a valid way to create free software and I don't believe Eric S. Raymond (the guy who, I believe, coined the term) claimed otherwise, only that the bazaar model was "better." Maintaining a bazaar style project is work, and it's work that easily leads to burnout. We should normalize the idea that you don't need to commit to being an "open source maintainer" to release a free software project; it should be enough to just release the source code (with or without binaries).
This seems really cool!! And I love to see alternatives to git. But @[email protected], you need to cool it on the replies. You're making the Fossil community look hostile by association.
I'm not a part of the fossil community, also when none of the people here bother to properly check out the website & call it Ancient or see the why behind the tool & it's development philosphy
Yeah that pisses me off
(So yeah I'll "cool it" but it makes the GIT-community look like hostile hive)
Why don't you tell me some more about what you like about Fossil... I'm assuming you've used other version control systems - how would you compare the feeling of actually using it in a collaborative workflow? How did you even come across Fossil in the first place?
This is my first time hearing about it, so would love to hear more straight from an actual user.
I love Fossil and use it for all my personal projects! I use syncthing to keep my all my repositories updated across devices and it works great!
I do wish I better understood either self-hosting or that there were more web hosts though, it would make collaboration easier when I feel like sharing. A git(hub) bridge could do it too I guess...
It's interesting that OP is here talking about this being better than git because it has its own server, but the only person besides op claiming to use it is syncing with syncthing 🤔
The binary executable for Fossil is a single file (repos are also single files, sqlite databases). That one executable does all the VCS functions but it also has a built-in web server that will host repos as a little customizable website. That's how you access the wiki, chat, forums, and ticketing system. You can also configure the repo, view timelines, view code, and all that stuff.
One can set up a proxy and publicly self-host the repo over the internet. That's what the official fossil site is, a hosted repo of it's own source code. I didn't feel like setting up a local web host, an ngnx reverse proxy, figuring out vpn for remote access, etc etc. So i just use synching and only run locally, because it's easier for me.
That's another nice thing about fossil, it's quite flexible and can grow with the needs of the project.