this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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FOSSIL: A complete Git alternative (lemmy.world)
submitted 14 hours ago by MITM0 to c/[email protected]
47 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I would like to introduce you lovely OpenSource Lovers to a GIT-Alternative called FOSSIL that I also stumbled upon. It's basically opensource Github-in-a-box which means it's an SCM with:

  • Bug-tracker
  • Ticketting-system
  • Forum
  • Wiki-system
  • even a Chat-functionality

& It's also self-hostable & the best part it's all in ONE STANDALONE FILE!!! how cool is that

However this tool supports a completely different style of development in FOSS called the "Cathedral-Style" whereas GIT suports a "Bazaar-Style" The person behind Fossil is the creator of SQLite, Dr.Richard Hipp & they even made other projects to support Fossil like a PIC-Like language called PikChr

Well here's a difference between Git vs Fossil & they even have a hosting service called CHISEL

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (3 children)

Fossil is more like a Jira replacement, and its built by one person with a severe case of NIH. Not necessarily a bad thing but I lived through it with Ubuntu, not really a fan of this philosophy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

I've worked with NIH VCS. Never again lol, I'll stick to git until something else becomes so universally recognized that people en masse start jumping ship.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

"NIH"?

[–] fluckx 12 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

I think "Not Invented Here". Meaning he wants to build everything himself from scratch despite there being alternatives he can use instead.

E.g.: Building your own httprequest library rather than using the existing one which is good enough.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

That makes sense, thank you.

[–] MITM0 0 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

With that attitude maybe we shouldn't invent at all Why not go all the way

[–] fluckx 2 points 3 hours ago

I think you're reacting to the wrong person as I didn't make the NIH claim, but merely explained its meaning. :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

this is a very childish way to react, you ok?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago

Not Invented Here, the urge to rebuild the wheel because someone else did it.

[–] MITM0 1 points 6 hours ago

Because of Ubuntu we get to have "Just works distros" & Fossil has features Git doesn't

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
  • open-source
  • Ticketing
  • Cathedral-style coding isn't very Open-Source, if you believe the man who wrote the book and coined the term.
  • it's okay to post your own words instead of drunkenly jamming HTML into Markdown.
[–] MITM0 3 points 8 hours ago

I like Markdown so I'm gonna use it

[–] TrickDacy 28 points 12 hours ago (4 children)

What about git needs replacement?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 hours ago

Something new is new, and apparently that's all tha-- SQUIRREL!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (2 children)

Git is far from user friendly but that's a design consideration from a decentralized architecture. Fossil will have the same considerations. People need to learn how to use Git.

The problem is there's only one person who really knows how to use it: Linus.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago

I'm so fuckin tired of hearing x is user unfriendly, it's not intuitive enough.

Like fuckin yeah. Sometimes you have to actually learn something new to use something new when I first started driving it wasn't user friendly. I had to learn how to do it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

does he? i was under the impression that linus considers it just as stupid as everybody else and its existence is somewhat unsettlingly like a separate organism that lives in our collective brain activity..

[–] [email protected] 6 points 12 hours ago

Seems like a historic artefact to me as well. And one of their mentioned points was "no sync via http" which even for 2006 makes me... hesitant.

And their history section ends in 2007, couldn't find a feature comparison in their quick start guide.

[–] MITM0 1 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

It doesn't have remote/server capabilities for one

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

I must be missing whan you mean by remote/server since pull, fetch, push... All interact with remote copies of the repo.

[–] TrickDacy 7 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Isn't that by design? I believe the intention was to offload that capability to an existing solution, usually ssh.

[–] MITM0 -1 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

Yeah & for that we have to deal withe Dependency hell Look at the size of Fossil & compare

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 minutes ago

Do you live in a world where storage is expensive or rare? Because I more or less forgot the meaning of deleting files.

Also git does support the git protocol as a server if you really need it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

What? Since when has ssh been a negative? Regardless of VC if you work on remote machines you need SSH, fullstop. I won't take you seriously if you think otherwise sorry.

[–] TrickDacy 2 points 3 hours ago

Not sure what that means. Never once heard of git being a problem or large in size. Further, it's extremely widely supported.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Learned fossil in college and I intensely disliked it

[–] MITM0 3 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Why ? As in the intense dislike ?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 minutes ago

Didn't like mixing issue tracking with vcs. I also didn't like any VCS hahaha, I was just writing shit in literally notepad

[–] [email protected] 17 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

I support reconsidering Git VCS hegemony. Darcs & Pijul too for DVCS.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

Darcs does not require a central server, and works perfectly in offline mode.

Git can be used that way too. Am I missing something?

[–] PHLAK 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Am I missing something?

No and, in fact, this was (and still is) a selling point of Git over the alternatives (e.g. Subversion) available at the time that required you to "check out" some code and no one else could check out/modify that code while you had it checked out.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 13 hours ago

No, you are not. People regularly equate Git and GitHub, though.

[–] PropaGandalf 8 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

no, this is exactly what git does

[–] MITM0 -1 points 6 hours ago

So Git has a ticketting system ?

[–] PropaGandalf 9 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

dont forget about jujutsu

[–] [email protected] 4 points 12 hours ago

Since jujutsu is Git-compatible it has very much replaced Git for me and is what I'm using for everything now. Its workflow is so good and miles ahead of Git.

I was trying out Pijul for a while before that and while it has a lot of great ideas and has a lot of potential due to the way its foundations work its interface is way too janky right now and missing features and nothing I've reported or the many changes I've submitted have been fixed/pulled since March. I'd really like it to be good but alas...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 14 hours ago (4 children)

Spent 5 minutes on the website and couldn't get a peek at their code... The most fundamental thing, IMO.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

fossil is made by the sqlite devs, for development of sqlite. this is not some amateur operation.

also, it's by the sqlite people, so expect the code to be... odd.

[–] MITM0 5 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

& The code behind Linux isn't ? People back then did some REAL sorcery with coding

[–] [email protected] 5 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

back then? both codebases are fully modern. its more that sqlite uses a style that differs from the accepted norm quite a bit. that, and they don't accept contributions.

[–] MITM0 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah it's the cathedral-style, Opensource but closed contributions as in no PRs

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 minutes ago

Which is not really open now is it.

[–] Im_old 6 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

it's not the most intuitive interface but there you go: https://fossil-scm.org/home/tree?name=src

[–] MITM0 1 points 6 hours ago

There are tabs above like a browser

[–] [email protected] 5 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Wow C, CSS and JS files at the same level. You don't see this every day

[–] MITM0 2 points 13 hours ago

Look at the bottom

[–] CodexArcanum 2 points 11 hours ago

I love Fossil and use it for all my personal projects! I use syncthing to keep my all my repositories updated across devices and it works great!

I do wish I better understood either self-hosting or that there were more web hosts though, it would make collaboration easier when I feel like sharing. A git(hub) bridge could do it too I guess...