> significant time and energy
All someone needs is to read through https://rogerdudler.github.io/git-guide/, and learn a few commands.
Are we seriously going to refer to “reading the manual” as “significant time and energy”? In this case you don’t even have to read the manual, just a primer on how git works. You know, on how the tool that you’re using works. Why are people so allergic to spending even a modicum of time on learning a tool that massively simplifies their life and makes their work possible?
Do plumbers complain about having to read manuals for the equipment that they use? Electricians?
As programmers our tools are easier to learn and use, yet we complain about having to any work at all.
Why even be a programmer? If reading about git is so hard, what about the rest of the field that doesn’t even have documentation?
How about we don’t make tools that cater to the lowest common denominator, in this case people who basically can’t be assed to do anything? RTFM.
I have a way of picking the losing side so I've been using mercurial for everything until now, and until now Bitbucket offered hg. They're decommissioning it so I'm moving over to git and I feel like my workflow has been hampered, not just in the immediate complexity of learning the new tool, but in the ongoing complexity of using a less good tool for my needs.
I'm dealing with it, but the situation you're describing isn't really the one that I and a lot of other whiners are dealing with.
I spend ages unfucking local svn working copies and long running branches on both windows and linux. git needs some serious flaws to keep up with that experience.
Thankfully the standard DVCS is flexible enough to enable the workflows others need too.
Fossil tackles much the same sort of problem, yet it's far simpler to use.
Most of Git's problems are due to purposeful choices, but they're design choices, not inherent aspects of how a DVCS must behave.
We've laid out our case for the differences here: https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.wik...
> our thing: Self-contained and efficient
This is not biased in any way and makes me want to continue reading. /s
Also, you can’t claim something to be “efficient” when it’s doing many different things like scm, issues/tickets, a web forum/ui ....
Then you have non-issues like git being installed via a package manager instead of dragging and dropping a binary. Yeah, this is such a huge problem that concerns people, better switch to Better Project (tm).
And then you take Gitlab and conflate Gitlab’s issues with problems with Git. I guess gogs/gitea don’t exist?
This page needs to be rewritten to simply list the differences in neutral language. There are good points but they’re lost in unnecessary epithets like “caused untold grief for git users”. I get it: git bad, our product good. Switch!
—
Personally, I don’t want something that tries to do many different things all at once.
Of course we're biased, but every row in that table corresponds to a section below where we lay out our argument for the few words up in the table at the top.
Here's the direct link for that particular point:
https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.wik...
Now, if you want to debate section 2.2 on its merits, we can get into that.
> you can’t claim something to be “efficient” when it’s doing many different things
We can when all of that is in a single binary that's 4.4 MiB, as mine here is.
A Git installation is much larger, particularly if you count its external dependencies, yet it does less. That's what we mean when we say Git is "inefficient."
But I don't really want to re-hash the argument here. We laid it out for you already, past the point where you stopped reading.
> git being installed via a package manager instead of dragging and dropping a binary. Yeah, this is such a huge problem that concerns people, better switch to Better Project (tm).
It is on Windows, where they had to package 44-ish megs of stuff in order to get Git to run there.
On POSIX platforms, the package manager isn't much help when you want to run your DVCS server in a chroot or jail. The more dependencies there are, the more you have to manually package up yourself.
If your answer to that is "just" install a Docker container or whatever, you're kind of missing the original point. `/home/repo/bin/fossil` chroots itself and is self-contained within that container. (Modulo a few minor platform details like /dev/null and /dev/urandom.)
> This page needs to be rewritten to simply list the differences in neutral language.
We accept patches, and we have an active discussion forum. Propose alternate language, and we'll consider it.
> unnecessary epithets like “caused untold grief for git users”
You don't have to go searching very hard to find those stories of woe. They're so common XKCD has satirized them. We think the characterizations are justified, but again, if you think they're an over-reach, propose alternate language.
> I don’t want something that tries to do many different things all at once.
Not a GitHub user, then?
I haven't used nor looked at fossil in maybe 5 years, but had a couple of questions.
Does fossil now have any kind of email support built in to the ticket manager? I remember when I tried to use fossil for actual production use, there was no way to trigger emails sent when, e.g. tickets were submitted, and one of the devs said to just write a script to monitor the fossil rss feed and send the appropriate email, which seemed like a baroque and fragile (and time-consuming) solution.
And is any more of the command-line behavior configurable (like the mv/rm behavior -- affecting the file on disk as well as the repository, or just marking the file as (re)moved in the repository)?
I have commit access, yes, but mainly I work on the docs.
> Does fossil now have any kind of email support built in to the ticket manager?
Yes. It was added in support of the forum feature last year, but it also applies to several other event types: https://fossil-scm.org/fossil/doc/trunk/www/alerts.md
> one of the devs said to just write a script to monitor the fossil rss feed
Probably me. :)
> seemed like a baroque and fragile (and time-consuming) solution.
A dozen lines of Perl; easy-peasy. That and a pile of CPAN modules, but that's easily fetched with `cpanm`.
> the mv/rm behavior -- affecting the file on disk as well as the repository
The default you're referring to was changed a few years ago: the old `--hard` option is now the default.
Also, a comment about the argumentation in "test before commit". It feels a bit artificial wrt. what can be done locally, what git commit and git push do and what their relation is in a sane workflow. Certainly, one can push untested stuff to the remote server by mistake; but, even so, this should be OK, because if one can push directly to important branches like master or similar without going through any reviews and other sanity checks, one has a problem... and the problem isn't really Git :)
You must be referring to just the table at the top, not to the detailed argument below, which mentions git-worktree and then points you to a web search that gives a bunch of blog articles, Q&A posts, project issue reports and such talking about the problems that come from using that feature of Git.
I suspect this is because git-worktree is a relatively recent feature of Git (2.5?) so most tutorials aren't written to assume use of it, so most tools don't focus on making it work well, so bugs and weaknesses with it don't get addressed.
Fossil is made to work that way from the start, so you can't run into these problems with Fossil. You'd have to go out of your way to use Fossil in the default Git style, such as by cloning into ~/ckout/.fossil and opening that repo in place.
> test before commit". It feels a bit artificial wrt. what can be done locally, what git commit and git push do and what their relation is in a sane workflow.
That just brings you back to the problems you buy when separating commit from push, which we cover elsewhere in that doc, primarily here: https://www.fossil-scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.w...
That's unfortunate. Reading the comments here, switch-branch-in-place is seen as some kind of flaw, but I don't think I would voluntarily use a VCS that doesn't let me easily do that (it's most sensible way for me to work, from way before Git was a thing).
You're conflating two separate concepts:
1. Git's default of commingled repo and and working/checkout directory
2. Switch-in-place workflow encouraged by #1
Fossil doesn't do #1, but that doesn't prevent switch-in-place or even discourage it. The hard separation of repo and checkout in Fossil merely encourages multiple separate long-lived checkouts.
A common example is having one checkout directory for the active development branch (e.g. "trunk" or "master") and one for the latest stable release version of the software. A customer calls while you're working on new features, and their problem doesn't replicate with the development version, so you switch to the release checkout to reproduce the problem they're having against the latest stable code. When the call ends, you "cd -" to get back to work on the development branch, having confirmed that the fix is already done and will appear in the next release.
Another example is having one checkout for a feature development branch you're working on solo and one for the team's main development branch. You start work from the team's working branch, realize you need a feature branch to avoid disturbing the rest of the team, so you check your initial work in on that branch, open a checkout of that new branch in a separate directory and continue work there so you can switch back to the team's working branch with a quick cd if something comes up. Another team member might send you a message about a change needed on the main working branch that you're best suited to handle: you don't want to disturb your personal feature branch with the work by switching that checkout in place to the other branch, so you cd over to the team branch checkout, do the work there, cd back, and probably merge the fix up into your feature branch so you can work with the fix in place there, too.
These are just two common reasons why it can be useful to have multiple long-lived checkouts which you switch among with "cd" rather than invalidate build artifacts multiple times in a workday when switching versions.
Git can give you multiple long-lived working checkouts via git-worktree, but according to the Internets it has several well-known problems. Not being a daily Git user, I'm not able to tell you whether this is still true, just that it apparently has been true up to some point in the past.
Since no one is telling me those issues with git-worktree are all now fixed, it remains a valid point of comparison in the fossil-v-git article.
Edit: It could be worth it to emphasize this in the Fossil vs. Git comparison that you linked, as it wasn't very clear to me after reading it.
Thanks for the feedback!
Well, not entirely, because in my opinion the detailed argument kind of hand-waves away the entire git worktree. Continuously switching branches inside a single large Git repo is certainly a suboptimal way to work with Git, but most of the time one should be able to avoid that with the worktree (though the worktree stuff is, of course, not a miracle cure for everything).
Also, Git continues to be taught with the switch-in-place method by default.
I’m not saying it is impossible to get a Fossil-like workflow with Git, just that there are consequences from that not being the default.
It is not like Fossil's workflow is a global optimum, it's just something Fossil does well.
A far better analogy is:
It's like saying we should reduce a programming language so people can use it without reading up on it, etc.
The core problem with it is that very few people can get paid more by being better at using their [D]VCS, whereas those more skilled with their programming language(s) of choice often do get paid more to wield that knowledge.
Consequently, most people do not fully master their version control system to the same level that they do with their programming language, their text editor, etc.
To be specific, there are many more C++ wizards and Vim wizards than there are Git wizards.
In situations like this, I prefer a tool that lets me pick it up quickly, use it easily, and then put it back down again without having to think too much about it.
You see this pattern over and over in software. It is why all OSes now have some sort of Control Panel / Settings app, even if all it does is call down to some low-level tool that modifies a registry setting, XML file, or whatever, which you could edit by hand if you wanted to. These tools exist even for geeky OSes like Linux because driving the OS is usually not the end user's goal, it is to do something productive atop that OS.
[D]VCSes are at this same level of infrastructure: something to use and then get past ASAP, so you can go be productive.
* https://rogerdudler.github.io/git-guide/
* https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2
Also see stackoverflow.
Git is a complex tool because it’s tackling a complex problem. I don’t see a way of making it “easier” without massively reducing what it can do. It’s like saying we should reduce a formula one car so people can use it without reading up on it, etc.
If something happens once, it happens. If something happens multiple times then it means you’re not evaluating why it occurred in the first place and learning from it. No tool in the world can solve this problem because it’s not a problem with the tool, rather the user.
Git is really not so hard, but it requires a little reading.