[somenewaccount1]

>Git focuses on individual branches, because that is exactly what you want for a highly-distributed bazaar-style project such as Linux. Linus Torvalds does not want to see every check-in by every contributor to Linux: such extreme visibility does not scale well. Contrast Fossil, which was written for the cathedral-style SQLite project and its handful of active committers

Ugh...so after all that fanfare of how amazing fossil is, the author admits it just doesn't scale well. I was wondering how that "see it all" approach worked for a busy repo, and now I know, it just doesn't.

I love SQLite, and glad the primary author is happy working on it with fossil. I think if he published it's largest downfall first, it might gain more adoption to folks that could actually use that feature.

[soerxpso]

Personally I see "doesn't scale well" as a feature, if I'm evaluating something to use on a personal or small project. Tools with clear limits on what they're not for usually have a more polished experience for what they are for.

[somenewaccount1]

Which is why I said he should be more upfront about it. I had to find that statement buried after 30 minutes of reading how amazing fossil was.

[ezekiel68]

In that case you might really love "...SCons, a popular Python-based build tool. In a nutshell, my experiments showed that SCons exhibits roughly quadratic growth in build runtimes as the number of targets increases" [0]

[0] https://blog.melski.net/2013/12/11/update-scons-is-still-rea...

[nmz]

I think [0] indicates that it does scale quite well, you can even test by comparing the 2. You can go from cloning to pushing on a repo in half the time. There's branches as well, so while the /timeline[1] seems too busy, you can always drop back to a forum or the bug tracker, which it has already.

  time fossil clone https://fossil-scm.org/
  time git clone https://github.com/drhsqlite/fossil-mirror

My results were

  fossil
   time > real    5m43.120s user    2m56.532s sys     0m48.246s
   ls -lh > 60M fossil-scm.fossil


  git
   time > real    10m35.043s user    5m58.427s sys     1m10.555s
   du -sh fossil-mirror/.git/ > 829M

[0]: https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/stats.wiki [1]: https://fossil-scm.org/home/timeline

[glandium]

There is something fishy with the repo on github.

  git repack -a -f -d
  du -sh .git
   65M    .git

It's also significantly faster to clone after the repack:

  time git clone --mirror https://github.com/drhsqlite/fossil-mirror
  65.10s user 21.22s system 35% cpu 4:05.92 total

  time git clone --no-local fossil-mirror fossil-no-repack
  26.92s user 2.99s system 155% cpu 19.190 total

  git -C fossil-mirror.git repack -a -f -d
  time git clone --no-local fossil-mirror fossil-repack
  5.42s user 1.18s system 211% cpu 3.121 total

Edit: took new measurements with --mirror on the first clone so that the "local" clones actually get all the branches.

Also:

  git gc --aggressive
  du -sh .git
   42M    .git

[nmz]

I imagine fossils internal git export function is not robust. Even when you {fossil git export} the repo, you still get a much bigger .git than fossil (20mb more), with errors on some checkouts. Repacking doesn't do much either in this case, so the functionality changes.

[whateveracct]

"Scaling well" isn't table stakes. it's a tradeoff.

[wodenokoto]

Everybody uses git as a cathedral style system by way of github/gitlab. So all things equal, it should scale just as well as a github project.

[gardenhedge]

Please read the article:

This article is not a comparison between Fossil and Git.

This article is not advocating that you switch your projects away from Git.

[dan-robertson]

Plenty of tech companies have massive monorepos which large numbers of people contribute to. I don’t know how easy it is for one person to see another’s branch though. So: maybe it can scale, at least somewhat, with a more centralised system.

[oxfordmale]

I have a love hate relationship with Git. It is current used for a lot of purposes it was never designed for by Torvald. It is time for something better, unfortunately Fossil isn't likely going to be a Git successor.