4 ms·

long long long time ago Fossil destroyed code for Zed Shaw And since that day, not one looked at Fossil the same way, at least not the same way they looked at

long long long time ago Fossil destroyed code for Zed Shaw And since that day, not one looked at Fossil the same way, at least not the same way they looked at git https://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org/msg04665.html https://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.o... I can't tell for sure how much of impact this had on fossil's adoption, its hard to beat git no matter how good you are, but I think it was a bit hit

metalliqaz 5y ago
from the linked thread: > I just cloned your repo. Everything is working fine. Breath, Zed. seems like he panicked and made it worse, then rage-quit
- jessermeyer 5y ago
  Right. Reading the entire conversation shows the parent messaging is FUD.
  - boygobbo 5y ago
    I've just read it myself and was very impressed by Richard Hipp's calm, courteous and honest demeanour. I would recommend this to anyone as a paragon of how to respond to a difficult situation.
- JoeQuery 5y ago
  It's been a few years but my one and only interaction with Zed via an email exchange showed me he was quite unstable and prone to outbursts. Never meet your heroes, they say.
  - scruple 5y ago
    I had exactly one interaction with him, too, whereby he shared with me a very long list of companies that he knew of which were hiring at the time, this would've been around 2012 or so. I got quite a few interviews as a result, and quite a few offers, FWIW, though I ended up taking a job with a company that wasn't on this list. I understand both that he is and why he is such a polarizing figure. Just wanted to put my positive anecdote on the pile, since they seem to be a less common when he comes up in online comments.
    - JoeQuery 5y ago
      I believe it. Some people exhibit pretty extreme behavior. It sounds like that was extremely nice of him :)
wizzwizz4 5y ago
Technically, Fossil didn't destroy the code; Zed destroyed it by running `fossil revert`. All Fossil did was run off into la la land where nothing makes sense and everything is invisible and the working directory is empty. Still an impressive bug – but the first rule of “my CVS has broken” is “stop running commands, and copy the CVS directory somewhere else”. (I've needed to do this to a .git twice.) Had he done this, he wouldn't've lost work. While he shouldn't've had to, “stop doing everything and take a read-only copy” is the first step when any database containing important data has corrupted.
badsectoracula 5y ago
Which is a shame because from the followup emails it becomes clear that the loss was actually Zed Shaw's fault (he explicitly typed "fossil revert" which is what deleted his code) and not the bug (there was a bug he encountered but it didn't end up in data loss).
Jach 5y ago
I'm pretty familiar with a lot of Zed's doings but I had missed this one. I doubt it impacted the adoption much, losing one advocate like that isn't going to doom your project. I finally gave Fossil a serious try last year for a few months, just on my own but I don't think my opinions would change if I tried in a team setting. I still love the idea, but the execution is... ghetto. Serviceable, certainly, but ghetto is the best overarching description I have for it. You have to be willing to look past a lot of things, sure many of them are petty, in order to take it over dedicated polished services for the things it combines. And git+[choice of issue tracker]+[choice of forum]+[choice of wiki]+[choice of project website]+etc. is the real competition against Fossil, not git+nothing, so even if it was better on the pure version control bits it would still be a tough battle. (Not to mention the elephant git+github is a pretty good kitchen sink on its own if you don't want to think about choices and have something serviceable that's also a lot less ghetto.) I also realized how much I love git's staging area concept once it was gone -- even when I had to use Perforce a lot, at least Perforce has the concept of pending changelists so you have something similar. I've never been a big fan of git's rebase, but it's also brought up a lot as a feature people are unwilling to give up, and I see the appeal. In summary, I think the adoption issue is just that people who do eventually give it a shot find usability issues/missing functionality they aren't willing to put up with.
- papaf 5y ago
  And git+[choice of issue tracker]+[choice of forum]+[choice of wiki]+[choice of project website]+etc. is the real competition against Fossil I think that this is only true for some projects. For some people, the ease of self hosted setup (one executable) and the fact that you can change the documentation, edit code and close bugs offline is a big win that no centralized service can compete with.
  - Jach 5y ago
    Sure, one executable is nice, that might be enough of a payoff for some people to overlook the rest. I think you may be underestimating the amount of choice that's out there though. For documentation alone there's countless options that don't require a centralized online thing. Three I'd use over Fossil again are 1) simple project doc/ folder with .md files inside (which you can render locally to look just like github with https://github.com/joeyespo/grip https://github.com/joeyespo/grip) 2) Doxygen or a language-specific equivalent if it's better 3) libreoffice docs stored either in the same repo or another one (perhaps a submodule). For project management I'm less familiar with the options out there but I'd be surprised if there was nothing that gives a really stellar offline experience. I'd give a preemptive win to Fossil on the narrow aspect that your issue tracking changes can be synced and merged automatically with a collaborative server when you come back online, whereas if you stood up your own instance of Trac for instance I'm not sure if they have any support for syncing. If you're working by yourself, though, then there's no problem, Trac and many others work just like Fossil and stand up a local server (or are dedicated standalone programs) and work the same whether you're offline or online. But when I'm working solo I prefer low-tech over anything that resembles Jira (and I don't even really dislike Jira) -- I've played with https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue as another offline/off-platform option but in my most recent ongoing solo project I'm quite happy with a super low-tech issues text file that has entries like (easy to make with https://github.com/dhruvasagar/vim-table-mode https://github.com/dhruvasagar/vim-table-mode) +--------------+ | Add thing | +==============+ | Done whens / | | other info | +--------------+ and when I'm closing one I just move it to the issues-closed file as part of the closing commit. I might give it an identifier if I need to reference it in the code/over multiple commits.
judofyr 5y ago
Heh, this reminded me of _why's comments from the Zed drama waaaaay back: https://gist.github.com/brianjlandau/186701 https://gist.github.com/brianjlandau/186701 > Let me put it this way. Suppose you’ve got Zed Shaw. No, wait, say you’ve got “a person.” (We’ll call this person “Hannah Montana” for the sake of this exercise.) And you look outside and this young teen sensation is yelling, throwing darts at your house and peeing in your mailbox. For reals. You can see it all. Your mailbox is soaked. Defiled. The flag is up. > Now, stop and think about this. This is a very tough situation. This young lady has written one of THE premiere web servers in the whole wide world. Totally, insanely RFC complaint. They give it away on the street, but everyone knows its secretly worth like a thousand dollars. And there was nothing in that web server that hinted to these postal urinations.
sgbeal 5y ago
> long long long time ago Fossil destroyed code for Zed Shaw 1) No, it didn't. Please read the part of the thread after Zed's initial panic attack. 2) To the best of our[1] knowledge, fossil itself has never caused a single byte of data loss. When fossil checks in new data, it reads that data back (in the same SQL transaction the data was written in) to ensure than it can read what it wrote with 100% fidelity, so it's nearly impossible to get corrupted data into fossil without going into the db and massaging it by hand. People have lost data by storing their only copy of a repository on failing/failed storage or on a network drive, but no software can protect against hardware failure and nobody in their right mind tries to maintain an active sqlite db over a network drive (plenty of people do it, despite the repeated warnings of anyone who knows anything about sqlite, and they have only themselves to blame when it goes pear shaped). Fossil makes syncing to/from a remote copy absolutely trivial, so any failure to regularly sync copies to a backup is end-user error. [1] = the fossil developers.

metalliqaz 5y ago

from the linked thread: > I just cloned your repo. Everything is working fine. Breath, Zed. seems like he panicked and made it worse, then rage-quit

jessermeyer 5y ago
Right. Reading the entire conversation shows the parent messaging is FUD.
- boygobbo 5y ago
  I've just read it myself and was very impressed by Richard Hipp's calm, courteous and honest demeanour. I would recommend this to anyone as a paragon of how to respond to a difficult situation.
JoeQuery 5y ago
It's been a few years but my one and only interaction with Zed via an email exchange showed me he was quite unstable and prone to outbursts. Never meet your heroes, they say.
- scruple 5y ago
  I had exactly one interaction with him, too, whereby he shared with me a very long list of companies that he knew of which were hiring at the time, this would've been around 2012 or so. I got quite a few interviews as a result, and quite a few offers, FWIW, though I ended up taking a job with a company that wasn't on this list. I understand both that he is and why he is such a polarizing figure. Just wanted to put my positive anecdote on the pile, since they seem to be a less common when he comes up in online comments.
  - JoeQuery 5y ago
    I believe it. Some people exhibit pretty extreme behavior. It sounds like that was extremely nice of him :)

wizzwizz4 5y ago

Technically, Fossil didn't destroy the code; Zed destroyed it by running `fossil revert`. All Fossil did was run off into la la land where nothing makes sense and everything is invisible and the working directory is empty. Still an impressive bug – but the first rule of “my CVS has broken” is “stop running commands, and copy the CVS directory somewhere else”. (I've needed to do this to a .git twice.) Had he done this, he wouldn't've lost work. While he shouldn't've had to, “stop doing everything and take a read-only copy” is the first step when any database containing important data has corrupted.

badsectoracula 5y ago

Which is a shame because from the followup emails it becomes clear that the loss was actually Zed Shaw's fault (he explicitly typed "fossil revert" which is what deleted his code) and not the bug (there was a bug he encountered but it didn't end up in data loss).

Jach 5y ago

I'm pretty familiar with a lot of Zed's doings but I had missed this one. I doubt it impacted the adoption much, losing one advocate like that isn't going to doom your project. I finally gave Fossil a serious try last year for a few months, just on my own but I don't think my opinions would change if I tried in a team setting. I still love the idea, but the execution is... ghetto. Serviceable, certainly, but ghetto is the best overarching description I have for it. You have to be willing to look past a lot of things, sure many of them are petty, in order to take it over dedicated polished services for the things it combines. And git+[choice of issue tracker]+[choice of forum]+[choice of wiki]+[choice of project website]+etc. is the real competition against Fossil, not git+nothing, so even if it was better on the pure version control bits it would still be a tough battle. (Not to mention the elephant git+github is a pretty good kitchen sink on its own if you don't want to think about choices and have something serviceable that's also a lot less ghetto.) I also realized how much I love git's staging area concept once it was gone -- even when I had to use Perforce a lot, at least Perforce has the concept of pending changelists so you have something similar. I've never been a big fan of git's rebase, but it's also brought up a lot as a feature people are unwilling to give up, and I see the appeal. In summary, I think the adoption issue is just that people who do eventually give it a shot find usability issues/missing functionality they aren't willing to put up with.

papaf 5y ago
And git+[choice of issue tracker]+[choice of forum]+[choice of wiki]+[choice of project website]+etc. is the real competition against Fossil I think that this is only true for some projects. For some people, the ease of self hosted setup (one executable) and the fact that you can change the documentation, edit code and close bugs offline is a big win that no centralized service can compete with.
- Jach 5y ago
  Sure, one executable is nice, that might be enough of a payoff for some people to overlook the rest. I think you may be underestimating the amount of choice that's out there though. For documentation alone there's countless options that don't require a centralized online thing. Three I'd use over Fossil again are 1) simple project doc/ folder with .md files inside (which you can render locally to look just like github with https://github.com/joeyespo/grip https://github.com/joeyespo/grip) 2) Doxygen or a language-specific equivalent if it's better 3) libreoffice docs stored either in the same repo or another one (perhaps a submodule). For project management I'm less familiar with the options out there but I'd be surprised if there was nothing that gives a really stellar offline experience. I'd give a preemptive win to Fossil on the narrow aspect that your issue tracking changes can be synced and merged automatically with a collaborative server when you come back online, whereas if you stood up your own instance of Trac for instance I'm not sure if they have any support for syncing. If you're working by yourself, though, then there's no problem, Trac and many others work just like Fossil and stand up a local server (or are dedicated standalone programs) and work the same whether you're offline or online. But when I'm working solo I prefer low-tech over anything that resembles Jira (and I don't even really dislike Jira) -- I've played with https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue as another offline/off-platform option but in my most recent ongoing solo project I'm quite happy with a super low-tech issues text file that has entries like (easy to make with https://github.com/dhruvasagar/vim-table-mode https://github.com/dhruvasagar/vim-table-mode) +--------------+ | Add thing | +==============+ | Done whens / | | other info | +--------------+ and when I'm closing one I just move it to the issues-closed file as part of the closing commit. I might give it an identifier if I need to reference it in the code/over multiple commits.

judofyr 5y ago

Heh, this reminded me of _why's comments from the Zed drama waaaaay back: https://gist.github.com/brianjlandau/186701 https://gist.github.com/brianjlandau/186701 > Let me put it this way. Suppose you’ve got Zed Shaw. No, wait, say you’ve got “a person.” (We’ll call this person “Hannah Montana” for the sake of this exercise.) And you look outside and this young teen sensation is yelling, throwing darts at your house and peeing in your mailbox. For reals. You can see it all. Your mailbox is soaked. Defiled. The flag is up. > Now, stop and think about this. This is a very tough situation. This young lady has written one of THE premiere web servers in the whole wide world. Totally, insanely RFC complaint. They give it away on the street, but everyone knows its secretly worth like a thousand dollars. And there was nothing in that web server that hinted to these postal urinations.

sgbeal 5y ago

> long long long time ago Fossil destroyed code for Zed Shaw 1) No, it didn't. Please read the part of the thread after Zed's initial panic attack. 2) To the best of our[1] knowledge, fossil itself has never caused a single byte of data loss. When fossil checks in new data, it reads that data back (in the same SQL transaction the data was written in) to ensure than it can read what it wrote with 100% fidelity, so it's nearly impossible to get corrupted data into fossil without going into the db and massaging it by hand. People have lost data by storing their only copy of a repository on failing/failed storage or on a network drive, but no software can protect against hardware failure and nobody in their right mind tries to maintain an active sqlite db over a network drive (plenty of people do it, despite the repeated warnings of anyone who knows anything about sqlite, and they have only themselves to blame when it goes pear shaped). Fossil makes syncing to/from a remote copy absolutely trivial, so any failure to regularly sync copies to a backup is end-user error. [1] = the fossil developers.