Fossil: A Git alternative with batteries included

I am always doubtful when people say that accessing information inside git is hard. I totally agree that defaults in git can be improved (and they are, git restore and git switch are a much better alternative to git checkout that I no longer use). So let’s review the section “A Few Reasons Why SQLite Does Not Use Git”:

“Git does not provide good situational awareness”

git log --graph --oneline --author-date-order --since=1week

Make it an alias if you use it often. Alias is what helps you create your own good default (until everyone uses the same alias and in that case it should be part of the base set of commands).

“Git makes it difficult to find successors (descendants) of a check-in”

git log --graph --oneline --all --ancestry-path ${commit}~..

Likewise you could consider making it an alias if you use it often. Aliases can also be used as a post-it to help you remember what are the command that you find useful but you only use once in a blue moon!

The mental model for Git is needlessly complex

I may agree about that one. For reference, this is what the article says:

A user of Git needs to keep all of the following in mind: The working directory The "index" or staging area The local head The local copy of the remote head The actual remote head

If git fetch was run automatically every so often, as well as git push (of course in a personal branch), then this model could be simplified as

• the working directory
• the “index” or staging area (I actually think that being able to have more than one for drafting multiples commit at once, like a fix and a feature at the same time would be better than only having a single index)
• your working copy of the shared branch
• the shared branch

And integrating your changes (merging/rebasing) should probably be exclusively done using a PR-like mechanism.

Git does not track historical branch names

I’m skeptical about the usefulness of this. But since git was my first real vcs (10 years ago), it may just be that I have not used a workflow that took advantaged of persistant branches. I assume that git annotate could be a solution here.

Git requires more administrative support

most developers use a third-party service such as GitHub or GitLab, and thus introduce additional dependencies.

That’s absolutely true but I’m not sure it’s a real issue. Given how many strategies there are for CI/CD (and none is the definitive winner yet) I do think that being able to select the right option for you/your team/your org is probably a good idea.

Git provides a poor user experience

https://xkcd.com/1597/

I highly disagree about that xkcd comics. Git is compatible will all workflows so you have to use a subset of all the commands. Of course you will have more commands that you never use if a software is usable for all the workflow that you don’t use. But you need about 15 commands to do stuff, 30 to be fluent, and some more to be able to help anyone. Compared to any other complex software that I use I really don’t think that it’s an unreasonably high count. That being said I totally agree that git from 10+ years ago was more complex and we should correctly teach what is needed to junior. HTML/css/js is a nightmare of complexity but it doesn’t stop 15 years old kid with no mentoring to build cool stuff because you don’t need to know everything to be able to do most of the things you may think of, just a good minimal set of tools. And people should definitively take the time to learn git, and stop using outdated guide. Anything that don’t use git switch, git restore and git rebase --interactive and presents you have to inspect the history in length (git log --graph or any graphical interface that show the history in a graph, git show, and more generally than you can filter the history in any way you want, being by author, date, folder, file type, …) is definitively not a good guide.

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To sum-up, I think that from this presentation fossil seems more opinionated than git which means that it will be simpler as long as your workflow exactly matches the expected workflow whereas using git requires to curate its list of commands to select only the one useful for yours.

Thanks

I'm just realizing that I was thinking of Pijul

inb4: Rewrite it in Rust!

I mean, Git doesn’t natively have pull requests either…the “official” method involves sending patches through email. It seems that Fossil has a similar setup (although without the tool)..

PRs are a feature introduced by GitHub. I guess Fossil bundles would be close enough to them.

EDIT: I was wrong. Turns out Git does have a pull request feature. It requires you to upload your code to a public repository, after which it generates a message asking to pull, which can then be sent via any medium to the repository owner. It doesn’t require patches, or GitHub. Differences to note: these aren’t like GitHub/Gitlab/Gitea pull requests, where you’re given a simple web interface and have to merge from a repository on that instance. Your repository can be hosted anywhere using git request-pull. You’ll most likely then send the request through email, and get feedback in the form of replies. If you push newer changes to that branch, you’ll have to request another pull, as request-pull only specifies a commit range. But yeah, I guess got technically does have pull requests. (For the scope of OP’s question however, I don’t believe he meant this.)

One of the strengths of open source is its diversity of technical solutions. It's a feature, not a bug.

Before git, there were other open source version control systems, and they still work. For example, sometimes a centralized repository is the right tool for the job, and subversion is still there.

Fossil is cool. Almost no one uses it, aside from sqlite themselves, so it sort of feels like a roll-your-own VCS. But it works for them, and I suspect it would work for a lot of other people too.

sqlite has some interesting philosophical foundations, and that makes it an unique project. :)