This was CVS/SVN approach, and that's the reason git won so quickly (no, it was not github like some people claimed, I've seen git become popular in my circle b

This was CVS/SVN approach, and that's the reason git won so quickly (no, it was not github like some people claimed, I've seen git become popular in my circle before github was a thing) I am not sure if you used CSV/SVN before - I did. It maintained the history of what was done in a very immutable way. The branches were heavy-weight and were only used for Serious Business, we generally had a person responsible for branching/merging. You only committed stuff which was in great shape and passed all the tests, just like Fossil wants you now. And there were manual source code copying, so much copying. - You are writing a feature and got interrupted mid-work to work on something else - copy/tar those files and restore from svn (you could also do a second checkout, but that destroys your cache). - Want to send incomplete changes to friend? run "diff" and send them the patch by email, or place that patch file on shared disk. - Your check-in failed, you need to merge in in latest changes from master? better tar up your work in case you break stuff. - Are you doing new feature and want to see if refactor will improve it? don't forget to make a copy of changed files in case it does not. None of this is worth committing on master. Who would want to share an incomplete feature which does not build / does not pass unit tests? Or an pre-refactor version of code which does not work? Turns out using "git" covers all those usecases, and that's why it's the greatest thing. Fun fact: we've started using git in our team using git-svn, without central git server - we had mutable and shareable commits until the last moment, when we pushed it to central svn server. IMHO, if you only want to record the final path code takes, and you plan to use "cp", "tar" and "patch" for throw-away work, then you might as well use a "releases" directory on FTP with timestamped archives. Why bother with VCS then?