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by indymike 2022 days ago
Disclaimer: I love Github. From a commercial development standpoint (ie. my day job), it's fantastic.

BUT: What a lot of developers, myself included, feel like is the source control in git is great. The project management tools (issues, actions, etc...) require centralization of certain processes, that for some projects (open and closed source), don't fit well. Sometimes the 'how it works' is a bad fit. Other times, it's where it has to be to work. For example, running CI on a container on Azure from actions. Yes you can move where it runs. But for some projects, localhost is where that should happen. I'm really happy to see people working on this, because it will be just as transformative as git and Github has been.

1 comments

I argue that centralization of certain processes is the entire point. How the hell are you going to manage a complex software project if everyone has a different version of the issues pertaining to it? Simply seeing an issue comment instantly update in GitHub as I am scrolling through has saved me tons of aggregate hours in wasted time on changing requirements.
First, I'm not arguing :-), just sharing. If I'm using fossil, I just do. Fossil is built by the people behind sqlite, and issues, wikis, etc... all of the pm stuff is baked in. Tickets that are referenced in check-ins are synced. This improves on github: if another dev has worked on a ticket and their branch hasn't merged yet, the ticket update is visible. Fossil also allows for heirarchal management structures, and so on. Incidentally, fossil's timeline is incredible.

Not saying that fossil is going to replace git/github. Probably not, but there are ways to solve simple information management problems that don't require a centralized, subscription service. By eliminating that, you open the door to much innovation... In the meantime, I've got a pull request or two to review over on Github.

i think fossil has the better architecture and it would probably take off if the baked in webapp were as polished as github. somebody should fork fossil and make a github clone.