Comment by wiremine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wiremine | Hacker News Reader

Good list, but I feel like they bury the lede: integrated wiki, issues, and notes. That doesn't scale to every project (linux kernel for example), but for a lot of projects it's really cool.

Other selling points from the Fossil site:

* Integrated Bug Tracking, Wiki, and Technotes

* Built-in Web Interface _and_ Self-Contained (I combined these)

* Simple Networking (no git://, just HTTP and SSH)

* CGI/SCGI Enabled

* Autosync - "Fossil supports "autosync" mode which helps to keep projects moving forward by reducing the amount of needless forking and merging often associated with distributed projects."

* Robust & Reliable - "Fossil stores content using an enduring file format in an SQLite database so that transactions are atomic even if interrupted by a power loss or system crash. Automatic self-checks verify that all aspects of the repository are consistent prior to each commit."

It would be easy to get into comparing git and Fossil feature by feature. That's interesting. But it's more interesting to compare the philosophies between the two tools.

edit: for grammer.

I don't get these two points:

> Built-in Web Interface _and_ Self-Contained

Is this different from `git instaweb` ?

> Simple Networking (no git://, just HTTP and SSH)

So out of 3 methods git supports they support 2?

And this is why GitHub is so popular. Perhaps the Git project should take a leaf or two from Fossil.

I think it’s a philosophical difference that the Git maintainers likely have a strong position with. Some people like having one piece of software that does everything in an integrated way, and some people like purpose-built tools that focus on doing one thing well.

Git is a version control system; it’s not a complete project management solution. You can build integrated solutions around it, like GitHub, but if GitHub’s issue tracking is too primitive for you and you want to use Jira instead, that’s super easy.

I actually favor that approach myself. If I wanted to use Fossil but their issue tracker didn’t work for me, the best case scenario is that I just integrate Fossil with Jira or whatever and just haul around this vestigial issue tracking system that I don’t use. Likewise, if I wanted to use Fossil’s issue tracking but not their version control, what then?

Git can also be a database if you want. https://github.com/ioquatix/relaxo

grammar

> But it's more interesting to compare the philosophies between the two tools.

So what are their philosophies? Fossil is for small things and git is for scalability?

Git is a filesystem ( https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Internals-Git-Objects ).

> Git is a content-addressable filesystem. Great. What does that mean? It means that at the core of Git is a simple key-value data store. What this means is that you can insert any kind of content into a Git repository, for which Git will hand you back a unique key you can use later to retrieve that content.

That's a great thing for matching the mindset of someone writing operating system software.

Fossil is on top of a relational database... which is also a great thing for matching the mindset of someone writing a relational database.

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