What do people think of the fossil DVCS?

Question

fossil http://www.fossil-scm.org
I found this recently and have started using it for my home projects. I want to hear what other people think of this VCS.

What is missing in my mind, is IDE support. Hopefully it will come, but I use the command line just fine.

My favorite things about fossil: single executable with built in web server wiki and bug tracking. The repository is just one SQLite (http://www.sqlite.org) database file, easy to do backups on. I also like that I can run fossil from and keep the repository on my thumb drive. This means my software development has become completely portable.

Tell me what you think....

Answer 1

Perhaps an uneducated knee-jerk reaction, but the idea of storing a repository in a binary blob like an SQLite database terrifies me. I'm also dubious of the benefits of including wikis and bug trackers directly in the VCS -- either they're under-featured compared to full software like Trac, or the VCS is massively bloated compared to Subversion or Bazaar.

Answer 2

Mr. Millikin, if you will take a few moments to review some of the documentation on fossil, I think your objections are addressed there. Storing a repository in an sQLite database is arguably safer than any other approach. See link text for some of the advantages of using a transactional database to store a repository. As for bloat: The entire thing is in a single self-contained executable which seems to disprove that concern.

Full disclosure: I am the author of fossil.

Note that I wrote fossil because no other DVCS met my needs. On the other hand, my needs are not your needs and so only you can judge whether or not fossil is right for you. But I do encourage you to at least have a look at the documentation and try to understand the problem that fossil is trying to solve before you dismiss it.

Answer 3

hi, Mr Richard Hipp: I am trying your vcs right now. I like the idea of having all integrated. After all, is all i want when i look for a system like this. I am an active user of Mercurial. And i couldn't find an integration with a issue tracker (I try unsuccessfully to set p Trac with mercurial in the past). After some test i realize that: 1) "add" command is not recursively, or i can not found in the doc a way to do it 2) i write a bat (i work with windows) to add 750 files and i run it (it took a while). When a run commit it jumps with "manifest malformed"

i think you could address this issues and others making a survey like the Mercurial's one in http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/UserSurvey. you could write me at dnoseda at gmail

i am interested in you work. keep improve it.

regards

ps.: as an mayor improvement you could add something like gitstat

Answer 4

damian,

1/ yes, fossil doesn't support recursive add. However there are some fairly simply workarounds such as

for /r %i in (*.*) do fossil add "%i"

on Windows, and

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 fossil add --

on Unix.

2/ I saw the message about malformed manifest when you are adding a file with non-ASCII characters in the filename. The problem was corrected in the last build.

Regards, Petr

Answer 5

I'm not interested in using it for source-code version control, but I am interested in a distributed version-controlled personal wiki that I can sync between all the machines I use.

Answer 6

@Kristopher

getdropbox.com might be the solution for you.

This is a program you can install on Mac/Win/Linux and it keeps a dropbox folder in full sync across as many machines you like, plus it has a public folder where you can post links to. You can easily through their web interface keep old revisions of files and the like.

One really cool thing is, you can with no problems work inside this folder, so you make a change to a file, go to another computer and refresh your document and your changes are live, plus a revision database is created.

A few applications work "live" with live data, meaning they auto update if the datafile is changed while the software is running. If you are a windows user you can use onnote from microsoft, if you are a Mac user a voodopad might be the ticket for you.

Answer 7

I'm landing on this page after an year of the last post, recursive add that has been mentioned here is now taken care of.

Fossil mesmerizes me with simplicity especially after I struggled to get a bug-tracking system to work with mercurial. I need to see how to manage multiple projects, publish the repositories for multi-user access and how to do merging, manage patches etc. I get the feeling that it wont be disappointing going forward.

Answer 8

I think fossil is really cool. The most important feature for me was easy installation, and developer friendly defaults. I currently use it to keep track of the local changes of my files. (Our project is hosted in sourceforge and kept track in CVS.) This way I can "commit" locally even if it would otherwise break the project, so smaller changes can be kept track as well.

Answer 9

Fossil is good. It is simple and easy to use. If fossil can provide GUI interface to check in and check out, then it would be better (prefer java gui to archive cross-platform GUI).

The main advantages of Fossil are "open source" and "use SQLite database", so somebody can compile fossil source code to make fossil work on google android platform (mobile and tablet devices).

Answer 10

Fossil is small, simple, yet powerful and robust, reminds me some principles of C Culture. Likable by those who develop independently and still collaborate. Any great project should start with principles and continue them at its core as it gathers more layers (GUI, extra features).

I am impressed with Fossil and starting to use... take a look at fossil

cheers