Hacker News Reader

Comment by mkramlich | Hacker News Reader

he gave reasonable arguments, assuming one does always want all of those extra features beyond VCS for each new project. for me, most of the projects i start never need to go public, and of those that do, most don't need a full-blown wiki or issue tracking system. README and TODO file are sufficient 99% of the time, esp with no public collabs. so git and github still hit the sweetspot for me in the default case.

View on HN

Fossil actually fits this use case better than git or mercurial, because fossil is just a 700 kb executable that you can take with you. No need to install a package or hunt for cygwin versions.

and the whole repository is just a single file. Backing up your whole project and the SCM is a matter of copying two files over.

Git is a swiss army knife for fossil's switch blade.

+1 mostly for an awesome handle

Fossil has a wiki, issue tracker, etc, all in a small little portable package - it's far more deserving of the 'swiss army knife' label than git. Git's more like an industrial lathe or something.

agreed! I was running low on industrial terminology atm.

> and the whole repository is just a single file

http://keithp.com/blogs/Repository_Formats_Matter/

I didn't find his arguments that compelling. User management is something you are going to have to do no matter what VCS you are using Fossil doesn't remove that requirement. Last I checked Fossil didn't magically generate custom CSS and project logos so I am still going to have to do all that stuff with fossil. Pretty much every thing on the if I don't use fossil I will have to do this extra stuff is stuff you have to do for fossil as well.

All this while fossil is relatively untested by comparison. If my project needs something more than a wiki then I stuck doing all the setup and config any way so I might as well use a real wiki and ticketing system.

> Last I checked Fossil didn't magically generate custom CSS and project logos so I am still going to have to do all that stuff with fossil

I believe you really don't want to do that though, last time I checked Fossil generated HTML from C, either directly or getting it out of the sqlite db.

"User management" in other systems involves either copying ssh keys or using a service like github. If it's Trac you're talking about then depending on the version either you're doing command line operations that make no sense, or maybe you got one of those fancy web admins.

The point was, fossil has a nice flexibly but easy to use integrated user management. I can go in and say that anonymous users can post tickets or not, commit or not, clone or not, all fine grain. I haven't ran into a single system that does this nor does it this easily.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com