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by petre 3143 days ago
We've been using it for the last 3/4 years. It's great and really user friendly, with integrated help and a web interface - everything in a single binary. The trouble with it is that it gets slower once you have a lot of history and many files. I don't know if you can use it for huge things like the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD ports tree. I once tried to import the ports tree into fossil and gave up after 2G and an hour. It will import anything that can do git fast-export. Now it also imports svn dumps as well. Fossil is a very good replacement for SVN. You can set up a central repo where everyone syncs on commit and update.
1 comments
RainaRelanah 3143 days ago
To be fair, Fossil's intended use case is the exact opposite of the Linux kernel. See 3.3 and 3.4 of the fossil vs git page[0].

[0] https://www.fossil-scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.w...

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qznc 3143 days ago
I find most of the differences listed there contrived.

One big difference is that fossil includes wiki and ticketing.

Philosophy differs: Fossil intentionally limits "distributedness". For example, fossil push/pull always transfers all branches with their name. Private branches are considered an anti-feature.

Minor differences are the licence (GPL vs BSD) and the data store (files vs sqlite). Under some circumstances these details matter, but not for the majority of developers.

The rest is not significant, imho. For example, "Lots of little tools vs stand-alone executable". Who cares? In both cases you type "$VCS $SUBCOMMAND $PARAMETERS" commands.

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RainaRelanah 3143 days ago
You're right, philosophy differs. I generally dislike private branches. It goes back to the origin of git -- intended for the linux kernel, one of the most widely used open source projects with tens of thousands of contributors. Linus doesn't want or need to see a million private branches. None of the projects I work on are of that scale. When your team is under a dozen people, being able to see what your coworkers are playing with in real time (autosync) is actually incredibly useful.

Stand-alone executable is pretty significant. Git is available on most servers -- fossil is not. If it's packaged in your OS, it's often outdated. Stand-alone kinda makes up for this as you can easily get the latest version with a wget & chmod on any computer, on all 3 platforms.

As for sqlite, it is an astoundingly solid rdbms that is well battle-tested. I consider that a big difference.

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