I would like to introduce you lovely OpenSource Lovers to a GIT-Alternative called FOSSIL that I also stumbled upon because of this Blog.<br> 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
  • Has built-in GUI
  • Also has a Web-Server
  • Self-Hostable like Gitea/Forgejo

& the best part it’s all in ONE STANDALONE FILE!!! which is extremely lightweight which you can copy to your $PATH & works even in crappy internet. 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”<br> The person behind Fossil is the creator of SQLite, <u>Dr.Richard Hipp</u> & they even made other projects to support Fossil like a PIC-Like language called PikChr<br> Well just in case; here’s a list of difference between Git vs Fossil<br> & guess what!! they even have a hosting service called CHISEL

Listen; Just check it out & use it for fun in your spare time even with the flaws it has (& Try out Darcs & Pijul as well)

50 points

What about git needs replacement?

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29 points

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

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11 points

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.

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3 points
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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.

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14 points

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

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7 points
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git is exactly as unfriendly as a distributed source control system that doesn’t shy away from power user commands needs to be

… sure it’s difficult to comprehend, but yknow what’s worse? getting into a bullshit situation and having broken garbage repos in every other “user friendly” system on the planet

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3 points

Nah, git has a bad command line UX. Which is why the developers are working to make it better, i.e. moving from checkout to switch.

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11 points

I remember Linus saying in an interview that he’d only really been involved in git for the first 6 months or so and that the other devs had managed it without him since then. This makes sense - Linus’s creations aren’t successful because he’s the only person who understands them, they’re successful because there are so many other collaborators on them.

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1 point

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…

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-3 points
Deleted by creator
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10 points

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

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-8 points

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

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5 points

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

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0 points

As in it’s literally Github-in-a-box you can spin up a web-server with a command<br> (Imagine a git serve command that launches your GitHub instance)

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21 points

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

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22 points

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

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

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25 points

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

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9 points

no, this is exactly what git does

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-6 points
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So GIT has a ticketting system, a Wiki, Bug-tracker built-into it along with a Version-tracker

It also has a Sync All command (I’m sure Git also has it Somewhere) ??

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5 points
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Darcs came out in 2003—Git in 2005. It was novel at the time compared to the alternatives. Darcs started as alternative to CSV & Subversion, not Git. Unlike Git it works on patches, not snapshots which has advantanges in merge conflicts.

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2 points
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Git uses mergetools, which do whatever you make them to. Patches can be created from snapshots, but snapshots are not guaranteed to be creatable from patches - you might not have original state.

EDIT: it uses merge drivers.

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4 points
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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.

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6 points

dont forget about jujutsu

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5 points

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…

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2 points

I ‘forgot’ it on purpose.

The compatibility with Git means it is ultimately shackled to the design decisions fundamental to Git which require hacky workarounds. The maker of Pijul has pointed out some of the fundamental ways it can never handle patches is the manner of Darcs/Pijul, but I am not in the position to pull some of these quotes.

I would rather see revolution over evolution, & the weird ties to Google & hosting the project Microsoft GitHub rub me wrong.

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1 point

but they are working on their own vcs. I think git compatibility is not much more than a convenience in the long term.

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-3 points
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Oh Yeah I like Pijul as well & I fully agree with your point of breaking the Git Hedgemony

BTW, tell me more about Darcs I want to know EDIT: Boy GIT-Fanboys are clearly mad about other VCSs existing😅

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4 points

Darcs is sort of like Pijul before Pijul. It is a little slower, but might not even affect you at your project size, but what it has instead is a longer history with more tooling & support—on the CLI, support from package managers, forge options. It ends up being my preferred option just for this reason even if Pijul has better performance, handles binary files, & the identity server is novel.

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1 point
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Is there any good videos on Darcs that I can watch ?

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21 points
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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.

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8 points

“NIH”?

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22 points

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.

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3 points

That makes sense, thank you.

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-7 points

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

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7 points

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

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7 points

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.

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-3 points

Because of Ubuntu we get to have “Just works distros” & Fossil has features Git doesn’t

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14 points
  • 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.
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3 points

I like Markdown so I’m gonna use it

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2 points

Cathedral-style coding isn’t very Open-Source

Cathedral vs bazaar is about development process, nothing to do with source code availability.

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2 points

This - cathedral style development absolutely is a valid way to create free software and I don’t believe Eric S. Raymond (the guy who, I believe, coined the term) claimed otherwise, only that the bazaar model was “better.” Maintaining a bazaar style project is work, and it’s work that easily leads to burnout. We should normalize the idea that you don’t need to commit to being an “open source maintainer” to release a free software project; it should be enough to just release the source code (with or without binaries).

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2 points

Make that Source Code With Binaries

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9 points

This thread might be the fastest I’ve ever seen discussion devolve from “that could be interesting” to just incomprehensible screaming.

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3 points

Yeah wtf it’s like there’s like a wolverine loose in the comments section

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-4 points
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These people don’t even bother checking out the site & some can’t be bothered to scroll to the bottom of the site & can’t even read

They only recently were made aware of this tool & within a few seconds they literally go “Muh Bloated” etc…

It’s no wonder

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