Monday, March 16, 2009

Fossil

Fossil is a “distributed software version control system that includes an integrated distributed wiki and an integrated distributed bug-tracking system all in a single, easy-to-use, stand-alone executable” (via Eric Sink). It’s from D. Richard Hipp, the developer of SQLite and CVSTrac. It uses SQLite for transactional storage, and like CVSTrac it runs its own Web server. I don’t believe Fossil solves any problems that I have, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

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May I ask what you're using for version control, if any?

I just switched from Subversion to Mercurial after a quick dismissal of Git, it's starting to be tiring all these new version control systems ;-)

I’ve been using Git for almost two years now. I like it.

Michael McCracken

I ran into Fossil last weekend, and agree it's very interesting. It has a few really appealing qualities - the standalone executable with built-in web server is really convenient, for example.

Eric Sink's later blog post on Fossil has a comment by D. Richard Hipp that explains some of his reasoning, and gives a little insight into why the merge conflict markers suck (he doesn't generate many conflicts).

http://www.ericsink.com/entries/dbts_fossil.html

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