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Fossil is posted to and discussed on HN all the time. It's a novelty, it differs in design from the popular tools that people actually use in their day-to-day j

by dymk 8y ago

Fossil is posted to and discussed on HN all the time. It's a novelty, it differs in design from the popular tools that people actually use in their day-to-day jobs. There's really no reason to think that Fossil is used internally at a rate higher than its public-facing usage. And I've literally never seen a project that uses Fossil aside from Fossil examples.

bch 8y ago
I use it for lots of projects, spanning years of work, including commercial projects with ~20 devs. Those projects aren’t public, and I’m sure lots of other people do use it that way. It’s still not going to rival the install base of git.
- cuspycode 8y ago
  I use it too. I like to self-host my commercial projects, and when I decided to move away from Subversion about seven years ago I did consider Git, but the ease of self-hosting Fossil made the choice for me. Just plug it into apache httpd and off you go. Some time later GitLab became available, so now I'm also running a GitLab instance. But the Fossil server has much smaller footprint and is easier to manage.
  - bch 8y ago
    The ease of use/management is a big deal, and to an extent I think it falls out of technical design decisions (proper database for repo storage that fully, easily, obviously allows first class multiple checkouts of a single repo instance). Others are philosophical design decisions, most of which I think I like, some I think I don’t, and others that just aren’t in place yet. Key is it’s nice to work with, and if I’m doing development/management, as much as possible I want it to be an enjoyable experience.
eesmith 8y ago
"All the time"? I counted about one HN posting per month. From https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fossil-scm.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fossil-scm.org there are 20 links to fossil-scm.org in the last 2 years. I manually looked at the last 2 years of submissions with "fossil" in the name and found an additional 4 which were not to fossil-scm.org. It's over 50% higher for Mercurial. I counted about 30 postings with the name 'Mercurial' over the last two years, of which about 7 were from mercurial-scm.org. I left out some of the obvious duplicates. You write "I've literally never seen a project that uses Fossil aside from Fossil examples". How much effort did you put into looking, and would you have recognized one if you did? After SQLite, the most widely used project which uses Fossil is likely Tcl. http://core.tcl.tk/tcl/wiki?name=Index http://core.tcl.tk/tcl/wiki?name=Index says it uses Fossil 2.7. For obvious reasons, there is an affinity between Tcl projects and Fossil. A search for '"This page was generated in" "Fossil"' in DDG finds some non-trivial active projects: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22This+page+was+generated+in%22+%22Fossil%22&t=ffsb&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22This+page+was+generated+in%22+%... . "Active" means "commits in the last few weeks." For examples: "MySQL++ is a C++ wrapper for MySQL’s C API" - https://tangentsoft.com/mysqlpp/home https://tangentsoft.com/mysqlpp/home "Jsi is a C (+/-) embeddable JavaScript interpreter" - https://jsish.org/fossil/jsi/doc/tip/www/home.wiki https://jsish.org/fossil/jsi/doc/tip/www/home.wiki "Cxxomfort (cxx as in C++, comfort as in comfort) is a small, header-only library that backports various facilities from more recent C++ Standards" - http://ryan.gulix.cl/fossil.cgi/cxxomfort/index http://ryan.gulix.cl/fossil.cgi/cxxomfort/index "SquirrelJME is intended to be a Java ME 8 compatible environment for strange and many other devices" - http://multiphasicapps.net/doc/ckout/readme.mkd http://multiphasicapps.net/doc/ckout/readme.mkd
- owstr 8y ago
  Also Fresh IDE[0] using Fossil and flat assembler g.[1] [0] https://fresh.flatassembler.net/fossil/repo/fresh/index https://fresh.flatassembler.net/fossil/repo/fresh/index [1] https://flatassembler.net/fossil/repo/fasmg/home https://flatassembler.net/fossil/repo/fasmg/home

by dymk 8y ago

bch 8y ago

I use it for lots of projects, spanning years of work, including commercial projects with ~20 devs. Those projects aren’t public, and I’m sure lots of other people do use it that way. It’s still not going to rival the install base of git.

cuspycode 8y ago
I use it too. I like to self-host my commercial projects, and when I decided to move away from Subversion about seven years ago I did consider Git, but the ease of self-hosting Fossil made the choice for me. Just plug it into apache httpd and off you go. Some time later GitLab became available, so now I'm also running a GitLab instance. But the Fossil server has much smaller footprint and is easier to manage.
- bch 8y ago
  The ease of use/management is a big deal, and to an extent I think it falls out of technical design decisions (proper database for repo storage that fully, easily, obviously allows first class multiple checkouts of a single repo instance). Others are philosophical design decisions, most of which I think I like, some I think I don’t, and others that just aren’t in place yet. Key is it’s nice to work with, and if I’m doing development/management, as much as possible I want it to be an enjoyable experience.

eesmith 8y ago

"All the time"? I counted about one HN posting per month. From https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fossil-scm.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fossil-scm.org there are 20 links to fossil-scm.org in the last 2 years. I manually looked at the last 2 years of submissions with "fossil" in the name and found an additional 4 which were not to fossil-scm.org. It's over 50% higher for Mercurial. I counted about 30 postings with the name 'Mercurial' over the last two years, of which about 7 were from mercurial-scm.org. I left out some of the obvious duplicates. You write "I've literally never seen a project that uses Fossil aside from Fossil examples". How much effort did you put into looking, and would you have recognized one if you did? After SQLite, the most widely used project which uses Fossil is likely Tcl. http://core.tcl.tk/tcl/wiki?name=Index http://core.tcl.tk/tcl/wiki?name=Index says it uses Fossil 2.7. For obvious reasons, there is an affinity between Tcl projects and Fossil. A search for '"This page was generated in" "Fossil"' in DDG finds some non-trivial active projects: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22This+page+was+generated+in%22+%22Fossil%22&t=ffsb&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22This+page+was+generated+in%22+%... . "Active" means "commits in the last few weeks." For examples: "MySQL++ is a C++ wrapper for MySQL’s C API" - https://tangentsoft.com/mysqlpp/home https://tangentsoft.com/mysqlpp/home "Jsi is a C (+/-) embeddable JavaScript interpreter" - https://jsish.org/fossil/jsi/doc/tip/www/home.wiki https://jsish.org/fossil/jsi/doc/tip/www/home.wiki "Cxxomfort (cxx as in C++, comfort as in comfort) is a small, header-only library that backports various facilities from more recent C++ Standards" - http://ryan.gulix.cl/fossil.cgi/cxxomfort/index http://ryan.gulix.cl/fossil.cgi/cxxomfort/index "SquirrelJME is intended to be a Java ME 8 compatible environment for strange and many other devices" - http://multiphasicapps.net/doc/ckout/readme.mkd http://multiphasicapps.net/doc/ckout/readme.mkd

owstr 8y ago
Also Fresh IDE[0] using Fossil and flat assembler g.[1] [0] https://fresh.flatassembler.net/fossil/repo/fresh/index https://fresh.flatassembler.net/fossil/repo/fresh/index [1] https://flatassembler.net/fossil/repo/fasmg/home https://flatassembler.net/fossil/repo/fasmg/home