6 ms·

Fossil is really cool. It never really caught on, which is kind of a shame. OTOH, it's competing with git, a very well-designed piece of software with ungodly

Fossil is really cool. It never really caught on, which is kind of a shame. OTOH, it's competing with git, a very well-designed piece of software with ungodly marketing (and a terrible UI, and it was so well designed because McVoy's various projects had already made many of the mistakes that Git didn't, although it avoided some of Git's mistakes, so Linus had something to work off of. But that's not the point).

yitchelle 10y ago
> with ungodly marketing Was the the marketing of git basically due to the fact that Linus created it?
- adambrenecki 10y ago
  I think it had more to do with GitHub than anything else. In GitHub's early days, they put a lot of effort into marketing Git (e.g. the now defunct "Git Is Better Than X" website), because they needed people to use it in order to use GitHub.
  - antod 10y ago
    I reckon it was a combination of Github and Rails being early adopters at the peak growth of their hype cycle. In the early days of Github it seemed like most of the projects there were Ruby based (Rails users overflowing).
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  Developer word-of-mouth in general, combined with the massive network effects of a version control system. Once you use a VCS because software you work on uses it, if you want to start your own project, you tend to use what you know.
- wangchow 10y ago
  Git was designed for the Linux kernel source which everyone using android or another Linux distro is interested in. That helps a lot because if it can handle that project surely it can handle any other codebase.
  - solipsism 10y ago
    Not any other codebase. Codebases with huge and often-changing binaries (e.g. images or 3d models), for example, were troublesome for git, at least historically. The Linux kernel isn't big in all ways.
plq 10y ago
IIRC people DID give fossil a chance but it turned out it could eat your data. So adoption stopped abruptly. Losing data is very difficult for someone who knows how to use git reflog.
- todd8 10y ago
  This page, http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil-v-git/wiki?name=Fossil+versus+Git http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil-v-git/wiki?name=Fossil+vers..., on the fossil-dcm.org site makes the following claim [emphasis mine]: > Fossil uses a transactional database for local storage, meaning that the repository is protected from corruption even if a crash or power failure occurs in the middle of a commit. Extensive self-checks protect the repository from corruption from bugs. No work has ever been lost due to a software bug in Fossil. I've never heard that Fossil could eat your data. I don't use it now, but I've tried it for a few personal projects and liked it.
- minusf 10y ago
  [citation needed] ? no software is perfect, but fossil uses sqlite under the hood and is developed by the author of sqlite. a fairly strong data integrity guarantee in my book.
- dalke 10y ago
  I know about https://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org/msg04689.html https://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.o... where a bug in Fossil in trying to figure out what check-in to update to, followed by a user attempt to recover, ended up deleting edited/uncommitted files. Details in http://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org/msg04699.html http://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.or... . Would that have been fixed via reflog? What other failures have there been? To note, many heard about Fossil because of Zed Shaw, who was bitten by the bug, and wrote about leaving Fossil because of the data loss. I wonder, therefore, if your recollection is echoes of that one report. Fossil users pipe up in HN comments, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12665875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12665875 from a day ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12655740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12655740 from 3 days ago, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12622773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12622773 from a week ago, so there are active users.
pampa 10y ago
People keep talking about git's terrible UI. I dont get it, anybody who had used subversion or cvs before could grasp the basics in like 5 minutes and have much better user experience.
- em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
  Just because A is better than B doesn't mean that A is good.
  - pampa 10y ago
    Back in the day using CVS, and subversion later was a constant struggle. Before switching to git i used darcs for several years and tried mercurial. Git was clearly better than any of them. So, how can you tell that git is no good, if it is the best of the tools available?
    - jack9 10y ago
      > subversion later was a constant struggle The only struggle about svn is branching (copy the whole thing) and merging was more frequent. There were many CVS systems, which I worked on, where there was no way to track who made what change in a day.
    - lucideer 10y ago
      You switched from using "was" in your first paragraph to "is" in your second. There are certainly more competitors to Git today than there were then.
      - isxek 10y ago
        Are there really more? Some similar projects like Monotone and Bazaar are no longer being actively/regularly developed IIRC, and the number of hosting services for something as well-known as Mercurial has been dwindling.
        10y ago

yitchelle 10y ago

> with ungodly marketing Was the the marketing of git basically due to the fact that Linus created it?

adambrenecki 10y ago
I think it had more to do with GitHub than anything else. In GitHub's early days, they put a lot of effort into marketing Git (e.g. the now defunct "Git Is Better Than X" website), because they needed people to use it in order to use GitHub.
- antod 10y ago
  I reckon it was a combination of Github and Rails being early adopters at the peak growth of their hype cycle. In the early days of Github it seemed like most of the projects there were Ruby based (Rails users overflowing).
JoshTriplett 10y ago
Developer word-of-mouth in general, combined with the massive network effects of a version control system. Once you use a VCS because software you work on uses it, if you want to start your own project, you tend to use what you know.
wangchow 10y ago
Git was designed for the Linux kernel source which everyone using android or another Linux distro is interested in. That helps a lot because if it can handle that project surely it can handle any other codebase.
- solipsism 10y ago
  Not any other codebase. Codebases with huge and often-changing binaries (e.g. images or 3d models), for example, were troublesome for git, at least historically. The Linux kernel isn't big in all ways.

plq 10y ago

IIRC people DID give fossil a chance but it turned out it could eat your data. So adoption stopped abruptly. Losing data is very difficult for someone who knows how to use git reflog.

todd8 10y ago
This page, http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil-v-git/wiki?name=Fossil+versus+Git http://www.fossil-scm.org/fossil-v-git/wiki?name=Fossil+vers..., on the fossil-dcm.org site makes the following claim [emphasis mine]: > Fossil uses a transactional database for local storage, meaning that the repository is protected from corruption even if a crash or power failure occurs in the middle of a commit. Extensive self-checks protect the repository from corruption from bugs. No work has ever been lost due to a software bug in Fossil. I've never heard that Fossil could eat your data. I don't use it now, but I've tried it for a few personal projects and liked it.
minusf 10y ago
[citation needed] ? no software is perfect, but fossil uses sqlite under the hood and is developed by the author of sqlite. a fairly strong data integrity guarantee in my book.
dalke 10y ago
I know about https://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org/msg04689.html https://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.o... where a bug in Fossil in trying to figure out what check-in to update to, followed by a user attempt to recover, ended up deleting edited/uncommitted files. Details in http://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org/msg04699.html http://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.or... . Would that have been fixed via reflog? What other failures have there been? To note, many heard about Fossil because of Zed Shaw, who was bitten by the bug, and wrote about leaving Fossil because of the data loss. I wonder, therefore, if your recollection is echoes of that one report. Fossil users pipe up in HN comments, like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12665875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12665875 from a day ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12655740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12655740 from 3 days ago, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12622773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12622773 from a week ago, so there are active users.

pampa 10y ago

People keep talking about git's terrible UI. I dont get it, anybody who had used subversion or cvs before could grasp the basics in like 5 minutes and have much better user experience.

em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
Just because A is better than B doesn't mean that A is good.
- pampa 10y ago
  Back in the day using CVS, and subversion later was a constant struggle. Before switching to git i used darcs for several years and tried mercurial. Git was clearly better than any of them. So, how can you tell that git is no good, if it is the best of the tools available?
  - jack9 10y ago
    > subversion later was a constant struggle The only struggle about svn is branching (copy the whole thing) and merging was more frequent. There were many CVS systems, which I worked on, where there was no way to track who made what change in a day.
  - lucideer 10y ago
    You switched from using "was" in your first paragraph to "is" in your second. There are certainly more competitors to Git today than there were then.
    - isxek 10y ago
      Are there really more? Some similar projects like Monotone and Bazaar are no longer being actively/regularly developed IIRC, and the number of hosting services for something as well-known as Mercurial has been dwindling.
      - 10y ago