4 ms·
On top of the command-line user interface being much easier for most people (it’s not as orthogonal as Mercurial, but it’s much more consistent than Git’s), the
by gecko 9y ago
On top of the command-line user interface being much easier for most people (it’s not as orthogonal as Mercurial, but it’s much more consistent than Git’s), the ability to have bug tracking, code, and wiki in a single executable, where all assets (not just code) synchronize, makes kickstarting a new project with full hosting environment ridiculously simple.
- flukus 9y agoHow good are the bug tracker and wiki? My immediate reaction to this idea is to throw up in my mouth a little bit because I remember the TFS experience, everything was integrated but all the individual components were worst-in-class. I can see the value for small and/or personal projects, but beyond that is there a good reason to not use seperate best of breed tools?
- beagle3 9y agoFossil’s bug tracker and wiki mostly evolved out of cvstrac, which also inspired Trac that you are likely familiar with. It is similar to trac, more bare bones but about as functional, and infinitely faster and more responsive. It is also completely distributed; do you have a copy of your issues and discussions for the day github eats them?
- Frondo 9y agoFrom the experience of someone who used Fossil for small and large projects (solo and in teams) for 3-4 years, they aren't very good. The bug tracker can be heavily customized, and get ready to do so, but it still has irritating limitations that are, when I checked a few years ago, WONTFIX limitations. Sending emails on bug tracker activity is one. (I've seen people talk about workarounds, like writing cron jobs to monitor the RSS feed of a fossil repo and send off an email, and, frankly speaking that is not a very good solution. It's going to be a little fragile and it's not administerable by non-scripting-savvy folks.) The wiki is also kinda wonky. Doing file attachments is weird, or was when I used it, the markup is non-standard (not mediawiki, not markdown), etc. The worst part is, while I can learn to work around the various oddities that basically all spring from Fossil being the product of folks who don't use a lot of other tools (and consequently don't see what other tools have essentially standardized on), I can't reasonably expect my less-savvy team members to be as dedicated in learning this one tool, because, ultimately, for what? How is fossil so much better than github or whatever? It didn't get us any farther, except now people have to learn some quirky new interface stuff. Day-to-day, zero benefit.
- krylon 9y ago> the markup is non-standard (not mediawiki, not markdown), etc. FWIW, it looks like the current version supports Markdown in the Wiki.
- gecko 9y agoI think your critique of the usability of the tools is completely spot-on, but I wanted to note one thing you reminded me about here: > The bug tracker can be heavily customized, and get ready to do so, but it still has irritating limitations that are, when I checked a few years ago, WONTFIX limitations. Sending emails on bug tracker activity is one. The modern Fossil versions can be compiled with real Tcl for scripting, rather than just TH1, which makes solving this problem, and a pile of other automation-centric issues, very trivial--at least if you don't mind coding in Tcl. (NB, you only need to do this on the central server, for obvious reasons; everyone else can just use the off-the-shelf binaries.) The rest of your comment completely stands, and is why I don't actually use Fossil.
- jhoechtl 9y agoSerious question: can you point me to the unorthogonal features of git? I personally never had an issue with it but maybe I only need some hints to see them.