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by darkpuma 2596 days ago
> If Fossil can’t be compared on the same level, maybe that’s a sign it solves fundamentally different problems.

Or Fossil provides a superset of the others. Like comparing a corkscrew, which only opens bottles of wine, to a swiss army knife that has a corkscrew. They both solve the same problem, but one of them also solves other problems and is generally a more useful tool to keep around in your pocket.

The world didn't lose much with Hg losing to git. But with Fossil losing, we lost a great deal. As a consequence we have a world where people feel locked into the proprietary bug trackers their git host provides. Had Hg prevailed, that situation would be no different. The only way the world would be different if Hg had prevailed would be fewer posts on HN whining about git's interface being obtuse. Not really a substantially different reality, is it?
3 comments
avar 2595 days ago
If you care about distributed bug tracking you might be interested in, or want to contribute to git-bug: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

It's aiming to create a fossil-like distributed bugtracker on top of git, with bidirectional importing from e.g. github's and gitlab's APIs.

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jchw 2595 days ago
I don’t think people feel locked into proprietary bug tracking, they just choose it out of convenience. You can export data from Github or Gitlab.

I mean hell, trac and redmine have been around forever now. Is an open source wiki+bugtracker that revolutionary?

My best guess is that there’s some benefit of merging the source control in, but I’m not sure; it’s not like other environments can’t provide integrated bug tracking.

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darkpuma 2595 days ago
> "You can export data from Github or Gitlab."

And then do what with it, import it into your own bugzilla instance? Have you ever tried that? It's a nightmare.

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jchw 2595 days ago
To be fair, Bugzilla is a nightmare by default.

At my previous org I imported our entire Github org into Gitlab EE. Don’t remember much pain, seemed pretty easy to me.

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rswail 2595 days ago
From my perspective, your last sentence is the wrong way around. It's not merging the source control into bug tracking, it's merging bug tracking into distributed source control.
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jacobush 2596 days ago
I used Fossil but it became very very slow when the repo size crawled near a gigabyte.
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