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by tenfingers 3955 days ago
In my mind the default git log graph (and most other git UIs) are very poor at rendering the graph itself.

Somehow, even a moderately simple repository which has been heavily co-authored will look like garbage; even though there _are_ two distinct mainlines that you can follow.

One of the best visualizations for revision control, IMHO, is fossil's timeline view:

https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/timeline?y=ci

It's clear, compact, and tries to maintain different lineages as straight lines. git tools, by contrast, just shift everything on right.

Not even github's network view is really usable, since the network simplification they perform destroys the locality of the changes.
1 comments
jlarocco 3955 days ago
I'm a little embarrassed to say I had never heard of Fossil.

At first I didn't like the idea of including a web interface and wiki, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. Having a change log for the wiki would be helpful, and I'm assuming it's zero cost if you don't use it.

Including an integrated bug tracking seems like an ingenious idea, though. Any idea how well it works out on real projects?

link
tenfingers 3954 days ago
I cannot comment too much myself, since I only tried it for smaller projects, and nowhere near the amount I gave to hg/git/svn/and others.

That being said, it's not any different from hg/git in terms of cooperation, and more similar to hg in the sense that history is irreversible by default.

But the UI (cli and web) is very well designed. There's nothing to dislike, really. I couldn't care too much about the wiki (IMHO, a better solution is use md documents directly in the source), but the issue tracker solves distributed bug tracking in a very elegant way. Contrast to git/hg, where you have to use third-party or centralized bug tracking with poor integration.

Fossil is used by the sqlite project (and several other hidden gems).

I still find unbelivable that fossil has such a well-designed commit graph and interface, and git (with so many eyeballs looking into it) has nothing similar (and I _do_ know "git show-branch").

link