7 ms·

> Fossil, in contrast, puts more emphasis on recording exactly what happened, including all of the messy errors, dead-ends, experimental branches, and so forth.

• messe 8y ago
  > One thing that isn't mentioned is whether Fossil supports working offline as well as Git does. My impression from this page is that it emphasising creating every branch on a server as well, which implies you need to be connected? If so, I'd consider that a "missing feature" as well, as it's something I use regularly enough and that's important enough that it'd be something I'd miss if it weren't there. The way fossil works is that by default autosync is turned on, which means that if you are connected to the internet all of your commits, wiki and issue tracker changes are synced to the server. In the case that you're not connected, everything still works as expected, and will sync back up next time you're online and try to commit or just run `fossil update`.
  • Vinnl 8y ago
    Thanks, that makes sense then.
• mannykannot 8y ago
  One should not have to choose - the history of complete units of work should be an abstract view of the detailed history.
  • cryptonector 8y ago
    So the abstract view should be useful and free from noise, but you want to be able to get at the noise anyways. But to what end? What's it to you if I typo and make other silly errors during development? What if I never commit until I'm done? If I never commit until I'm done you will not see my mistakes, but if there's nothing like `git add -e`, then I won't be able to split up my commits logically and so the upstream history when I push will be devoid of useful detail. Even if I do commit early and often, I will almost never do all my work in the order and logical splits that makes most sense for others to see after I'm done... unless you give me a powerful rebase facility. No rebase -> no clean history upstream, only lots and lots of merges with pointers to messy history (where authors commit early and often) or shallow history (where they commit only when done) in branches you'll almost never want to see. This is the worst possible outcome! The only logical history organization here is "the large merge commit". You get far too little abstraction on the actual history and far too much noise if you want more detail. There's also the risk that, because you cannot separate bits of work as "done" and push them separately, your branch will accumulate ever more change and reach a point where you cannot continue without doing much more work, and then you won't be able to easily salvage any of the work done to that point in that branch. This one is a big deal to me too.
    • mannykannot 8y ago
      I haven't looked into Fossil into enough detail to know if your objections are valid complaints about the way it does things, but they are not objections to the principle that I set out in in my original post. If you have to rewrite the actual history to get what you call a 'clean' history, rather than just overlay the detailed history with a sparse abstract lattice joining the key points, then it is not a history at all. This could be a problem if you need to do a post-mortem analysis, or if you make a mistake in the rewriting of the history. I tend to regard frequent extensive rebasing as a process smell - not necessarily a problem, but a warning that there might be one.
      • slavik81 8y ago
        When I worked with VCS that couldn't rebase, my strategy was simply to not commit until everything was perfect. I had a local branch. It was just not version controlled. When I later started using git, my workflows simply became safer and easier.