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I love the idea of fossil, git cli has horrible and unintuitive porcelain. There is no brain dead git undo (except for the 'well actually if you sell your soul

I love the idea of fossil, git cli has horrible and unintuitive porcelain. There is no brain dead git undo (except for the 'well actually if you sell your soul to the reflog' folks), but ultimately, just like C and unix, git may be annoying in some ways but its inertia and ubiquity keep it going way longer than it's technical merits deserve when directly compared to competitors. Also, fossil feels like someone built it for almost NIH reasons, which I freely admit is just my outsiders impression, but it feels to me like the tcl community tends to dogfood themselves a lot for cultural reasons. But fossil is already more complete and battle tested than anything this lowly amateur will accomplish in his career.

rndgermandude 5y ago
As for NIH, kinda a bit but not really. Fossil was first released in 2006, Git in 2005 (mercurial in 2005 as well). At this point in time, there was no clear "DVCS" (distributed version control system) winner yet. The author of Fossil is drh, who is a lot more famous for being the author of sqlite (who also happens to be a major player in the TCL community). If I remember correctly[0], Fossil was written a) to dogfood sqlite (fossil uses sqlite) and also b) to get something able to not just do the VC part for sqlite, but tightly integrated issue tracking, docs, rel-eng, etc in one single system, as well as some VC-related features not present in git/mercurial and other competitors of the time (and in many cases not available in git or mercurial of today). [0] I looked into all this new-fangled DVCS stuff back then, because it looked really interesting compared to subversion that I was using at the time, and was a pain.
SubjectToChange 5y ago
> Also, fossil feels like someone built it for almost NIH reasons, Considering the rest of the SQLite development toolchain, it would be more surprising if they _didn't_ make something like fossil. Although shunning mainstream tools like git is probably rooted in a "not invented here" attitude, I love that they bother to do so. Of course it's interesting to see what bespoke solutions they come up with, but it's amazing to see such a highly complex piece of software come with such a trivial set of dependencies. Indeed, even if it's antisocial for the SQLite devs to play in their own sandbox, the end result is nothing but increased portability for the rest of us.
martinvonz 5y ago
Check out https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless for `git undo` (and more)! (arxanas shared a link to my project elsewhere in this thread :))
bachmeier 5y ago
> fossil feels like someone built it for almost NIH reasons Are you aware that Git was not the first version control system? That doesn't mean Git was built for NIH reasons.

rndgermandude 5y ago

As for NIH, kinda a bit but not really. Fossil was first released in 2006, Git in 2005 (mercurial in 2005 as well). At this point in time, there was no clear "DVCS" (distributed version control system) winner yet. The author of Fossil is drh, who is a lot more famous for being the author of sqlite (who also happens to be a major player in the TCL community). If I remember correctly[0], Fossil was written a) to dogfood sqlite (fossil uses sqlite) and also b) to get something able to not just do the VC part for sqlite, but tightly integrated issue tracking, docs, rel-eng, etc in one single system, as well as some VC-related features not present in git/mercurial and other competitors of the time (and in many cases not available in git or mercurial of today). [0] I looked into all this new-fangled DVCS stuff back then, because it looked really interesting compared to subversion that I was using at the time, and was a pain.

SubjectToChange 5y ago

> Also, fossil feels like someone built it for almost NIH reasons, Considering the rest of the SQLite development toolchain, it would be more surprising if they _didn't_ make something like fossil. Although shunning mainstream tools like git is probably rooted in a "not invented here" attitude, I love that they bother to do so. Of course it's interesting to see what bespoke solutions they come up with, but it's amazing to see such a highly complex piece of software come with such a trivial set of dependencies. Indeed, even if it's antisocial for the SQLite devs to play in their own sandbox, the end result is nothing but increased portability for the rest of us.

martinvonz 5y ago

Check out https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless https://github.com/arxanas/git-branchless for `git undo` (and more)! (arxanas shared a link to my project elsewhere in this thread :))

bachmeier 5y ago

> fossil feels like someone built it for almost NIH reasons Are you aware that Git was not the first version control system? That doesn't mean Git was built for NIH reasons.