[Osiris]

The examples he presents to compare the features of GitHub to Fossil, not git itself.

Fossil has a GUI built-in that makes visualizing the repo easy. There are tools for Git that provide similar functionality.

1. "Git makes it difficult to find successors (descendents) of a check-in" - Use a Git GUI like SourceTree and it's really damn easy to jump to a commit and review the entire graph up and down using links to jump to parent/child commits (even multiple parents for merges.

2. "The mental model for Git is needlessly complex" - Again, a Git GUI can make it really easy to keep track of "changed but not ready to commit, changed and ready to commit, local and remote branch"

3. "Git does not track historical branch names" - The example he provides here shows a visual graph in Fossil of the branch history. The exact same thing is available in Git via "git log --graph --all --decorate" or a GUI that shows the graph.

4. "Git requires more administrative support" - "apt install git" or "brew install git" or most systems come with it pre-installed. Windows is a bit more annoying.

5. "Git provides a poor user experience" - "Just memorize the shell commands". Again, there is tooling available for Git to remove this requirement.

It seems to me that his main complaint is that Git doesn't provide a GUI out of the box to make visualizing the repository easier. I get that, but there are enough tooling options available that it becomes a non-issue. SourceTree is a native app for Mac and Windows and there are various other GUIs even CLI GUIs for Git that users have a lot of flexibility. Fossil would seem to require them to use the GUI provided by Fossil whether they like it or not.

I'm not bashing on Fossil at all. I'm just saying that his arguments here show a lack of knowledge about the available tooling for Git and not fundamental advantages of Fossil over Git.

[shkkmo]

> 3. "Git does not track historical branch names" - The example he provides here shows a visual graph in Fossil of the branch history. The exact same thing is available in Git via "git log --graph --all --decorate" or a GUI that shows the graph.

No, that Git command only shows current local and remote branch heads, not the branches to which a commit historically belonged. If you look at the link he posted, that git hub page provides that same info. AFAIK Git does not store this historical information. If you look at the example links he provides, in Fossil each commit has tags saying what branch(es?) it belonged to.

I do agree with the rest of your points. I use a combo of GUI for viewing current state and easily adding/removing file, I also use more complicated git commands when I need to do stuff that isn't easy in the GUI I use.

[buvanshak]

> Use a Git GUI like SourceTree..

It quickly fails to scale. The issue is when you want to use commands to find the successors and build some processing over it..

>"The mental model for Git is needlessly complex" - Again, a Git GUI can make it really easy to keep track of "changed but not ready to commit..

That is a very limited situtation. In the course of using a VCS, for a long running project, one encounters numerous situtations where having a complex mental modal quickly feels exhausting...

> The exact same thing is available in Git via "git log --graph --all --decorate" or a GUI that shows the graph.

No. it is a bit different. In Git, branches can easily jump around, and the commits that were previously under a branch will have no information in them regarding which branch they were originally made..

>. Again, there is tooling available for Git to remove this requirement.

Again, you are not thinking like a power user. GUI's only works if you follow some predefined "happy path"..

> I'm just saying that his arguments here show a lack of knowledge about the available tooling for Git

To me, it seems that you are lacking enough experience to identify what the author is talking about..