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Well, that seems to be a negative reaction to someone posting a link to fossil. I think it's pretty relevant since fossil takes the approach of storing everythi

Well, that seems to be a negative reaction to someone posting a link to fossil. I think it's pretty relevant since fossil takes the approach of storing everything you'd need to host the repository within a checkout. That includes the project's web presence, the issues, a wiki, etc. I think fossil is pretty darn neat in that regard, however some of the implementation choices come off as esoteric after dealing with the git ecosystem for a while. Other than that fossil feels like it has some nice ideas which haven't been effectively explored by other SCM offerings, though unfortunately they haven't been totally explored by fossil devs either (IMO). Stuff like working with issues in the repository is nice, but the command line interface that fossil presents to work with them is very clunky. If fossil had gotten to the point of critical mass before git then I'm sure these sorts of issues would have been handled, but since it didn't we're somewhat stuck with what's currently available.

devoply 8y ago
Those features sound like something the developers of Git should consider adding to the feature set of Git... So that everything goes with the repo instead of staying in the webapp.
- fundamental 8y ago
  The challenge with respect to that is that there are pretty notable trade offs with design choices for implementing a bug tracker, wiki, etc at this stage of git's development. Any one choice by the official git project core would be met with serious push back. The best outcome for git in my opinion would be some work put into in-repo issue tracking, but not as a part of git's core distribution. There have been a number of independent efforts to tackle all of these problems but they've lost steam for the past 5 years or so. It's too bad since it's a pretty neat problem space to see solutions built in and to discuss them, but that seems to be the current state of things.
andrewla 8y ago
The negative reactions seem to center on the phrasing of the title -- "an open source alternative to Git". This seems to imply that Fossil is open source where git is not, which is clearly incorrect. There's no term for "git + issue tracker + wiki + pull request manager + web presence + access controls + organizational tools" that GitHub represents at the moment. Fossil checks a couple more boxes in that list than Git does, and represents an open-source alternative to GitHub in that sense. That's hard to express in the title, but the title as it stands is misleading at best. "Fossil - a SQL database based alternative to Git" would be more accurate, but a little less sexy.

devoply 8y ago

Those features sound like something the developers of Git should consider adding to the feature set of Git... So that everything goes with the repo instead of staying in the webapp.

fundamental 8y ago
The challenge with respect to that is that there are pretty notable trade offs with design choices for implementing a bug tracker, wiki, etc at this stage of git's development. Any one choice by the official git project core would be met with serious push back. The best outcome for git in my opinion would be some work put into in-repo issue tracking, but not as a part of git's core distribution. There have been a number of independent efforts to tackle all of these problems but they've lost steam for the past 5 years or so. It's too bad since it's a pretty neat problem space to see solutions built in and to discuss them, but that seems to be the current state of things.

andrewla 8y ago

The negative reactions seem to center on the phrasing of the title -- "an open source alternative to Git". This seems to imply that Fossil is open source where git is not, which is clearly incorrect. There's no term for "git + issue tracker + wiki + pull request manager + web presence + access controls + organizational tools" that GitHub represents at the moment. Fossil checks a couple more boxes in that list than Git does, and represents an open-source alternative to GitHub in that sense. That's hard to express in the title, but the title as it stands is misleading at best. "Fossil - a SQL database based alternative to Git" would be more accurate, but a little less sexy.