| Fossil's bisect works better than Git's in my experience, since Fossil's data model permits bidirectional tracing, whereas Git can go backwards in time only. This allows commands like "fossil bisect status" to show where you are in the decision tree, since it has to trace forward in time as well to provide the answer. Fossil's strong resistance to changing committed history encourages a culture of not committing predictably-broken stuff, at least not to long-lived branches. This seems like an inherently good thing, to me. Every commit to long-lived development branches should pass all tests and should build on every supported platform. Fossil has tools for fixing this after the fact, but test-first development is your first line of defense for avoiding problems here. If you're doing experimental work, you do it on a branch in Fossil, which unlike in Git is sync'd globally across all repo clones, so you can do things like check out the branch on another machine and test there before merging it down to the parent branch, presumably one of these long-lived development branches. This is useful in cross-platform development, so you catch portability problems. (Incidentally, this merge point provides most of the benefits of Git's rebase without rewriting history and without losing the record of how you got to that merge point.) Fossil just got a feature to avoid the need for a branch in that case: "fossil patch", which creates a Fossil repository (a specially-formatted SQLite database) with as little as one proposed commit, then gives you tools for schlepping that to another repo and integrating it temporarily so you can test on another machine before committing anything. These patch files solve all of the problems with "diff -u": preserve commit comments, file additions/deletions/renames, branches/tags, and so forth. Fossil's shortest-path bisect algorithm can sometimes cause it to go down unstable branches, but there are ways to redirect it back to the stable branch or to skip broken commits. Fossil is quite the antithesis of unusable and nightmarish in my experience. |