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Comment by morbidhawk | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the process of moving all of my repositories hosted on GitHub to fossil scm instead. Unlike GitHub it is open source[1] and with a simple cgi script[2] I am able to host all of my repositories on my own web server. After knowing git, fossil wasn't very hard to learn and it comes with ticketing and wiki built-in and accessible via a web UI locally on any machine I'm using.

One of the benefits in addition to being able to read fossil source code and being able change/style the web interface however I want is that I don't have to worry about staying up to date on Terms of Service changes I really have no say in.

Edit: failed to mention fossil can import/export to/from a git repository[3]

[1] 2-clause BSD license: https://www.fossil-scm.org/xfer/artifact/f99187d1905883d3

[2] cgi script: http://fossil-scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/server.wiki#cgi

[3] import/export git: http://fossil-scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/inout.wiki

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I'm almost in the same boat. I'm putting all new repos in Fossil.

I like being able to have complete control over the web interface. I like that it's lightweight, unlike say Gitlab, yet provides a full website. I like that the bug tracker is part of the repo rather than part of a company's proprietary infrastructure.

The biggest advantage, by far, is that it's not Git. I agree that Git is good for a lot of projects. It's an unnecessarily complicated beast for small projects with a couple of collaborators, neither of whom are willing to spend hours dealing with weird commands to handle a repo that got messed up for unknown reasons. Fossil, unlike Git, is version control that others are willing to use.

I agree 100%, I'm a lot happier with it for personal projects especially once I got the hang of it, and you get a lot of web tools that are baked into it nicely. The only concern going into it was knowing that I couldn't change/undo previous history but since using it I actually think that is a version control feature you want (assuming you don't slip in a password) so you don't risk losing previous data, you just have to be more thorough in looking at what you are committing.

> assuming you don't slip in a password

You actually can delete a password using shunning, but it's not a regular part of the development process. (I only mention that because many potential users are scared off because they misinterpret not being able to change history.)

Have you considered using Gogs - Go git service https://gogs.io/ Or Gitlab?

I've tried GitLab before and wasn't too impressed. Gogs looks interesting, it looks like it might just be a single binary file like fossil which would be nice, all I had to do on windows is add the location of the single binary to the path and on linux I just had to move it to my bin folder and wham it works. I've been really happy with fossil so far so not looking to switch anytime soon, gogs certainly looks interesting

I'd definitely recommend GitLab for teams and workplaces... But not so much an individual. Though, the CI stuff being so damn simple makes for some niceness.

Gogs/Gitea are great for individuals as a single drop in file, but it is a hosted service.

If you're willing to drop git and use fossil, it comes with the benefit of pretty much everything any hosted git solution has, as well as not needing to run a service. It has ticketing and wiki inbuilt. The only thing a hosted solution might supply is CI/CD.

If you're going well with fossil, with it's ability to integrate with git repos, I don't think you're going to find anything else that feels as good.

Yes I believe Gogs is a single binary and fairly easy to deploy as a result. Gitlab is nice, but is a lot to setup and maintain unless you like that sort of thing, as I do.

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