[barrkel]

After svn, git was a breath of fresh air; far easier to use and reason about, not to mention much faster.

I don't think much of your all-in-one solution like fossil - that's a competitor for GitHub (without the bits that make GH good), not git.

I tried to use hg at one point in the early days, and found it much slower than git. Git's low latency for commands made a substantial difference, perceptually. In principle I think git encourages too much attention to things like rebases, which fraudulently rewrite history and lie about how code was written, just so the diff history can look neater. Working code should be the primary artifact, not neat history, and rebases and other rewrites make it too easy to cause chaos with missing or duplicated commits in a team environment. So ideologically, mercurial is a better fit, but that's not enough to make me use it.

Fit is a function of an environment; when we say survival of the fittest, we mean fitness as adapted to an environment. Feature set isn't the only aspect; at this point, the network effects of git are insurmountable without a leap forward in functionality of some kind.

(I think git & hg are just as elegant as one another; to me, the elegance is in the Merkle tree and the conceptual model one needs to operate the history graph.)

[jat850]

Can you explain what you mean by fossil being a competitor for github, rather than git? Fossil is a scm with additional features for usage, but (the last I used it, and to my memory) it was just the command line fossil very much like git, and that's how I used it.

What makes it the case that fossil cannot be a competitor to git (or hg), in that they are both a vcs?

edit I haven't had a lot of sleep. What I'm trying to ask, I suppose, is why can't you use fossil just like git and ignore any all-in-one features it provides? (This is not to comment on how good, scalable, fast, correct, or robust it is.)

[wyoung2]

You can, though I suspect the OP's focus on speed means you'd want to turn off Fossil's autosync feature, which makes it operate more like Git: checkins go only the local repository initially, and then you must later explicitly push them to the repo you cloned from.

This is why Subversion was "slow": your local working speed was gated by the speed of the central repo, which could be slow if it was under-powered or overloaded, as was common with the free Subversion hosts of the day. At least with Git, you can batch your local changes and push them all at some more convenient time, such as when you were going off for a break anyway.