Fossil – A high-reliability distributed software configuration management system
fossil-scm.org
fossil-scm.org
But the underlying point here is an interesting one: if I'm a GitHub user and I'm not happy with the idea of Microsoft acquiring the company, what alternatives exist if I want to move away from GitHub?
There are tons of them, but it the realm of simple, self-hosted solutions that offer code hosting, issue tracking, and a wiki, Fossil stacks up quite well. It's a single executable that's lightweight enough that it can be called via CGI in shared hosting environment to replicate much of what GitHub offers. In that context, I think Fossil is worth looking at.
If moving away from Git isn't an option, I'm a big fan of Gitea[0], though I haven't hosted it on the internet before (unlike Fossil, which I do use to host my side-projects). Gitea is a community-driven fork of Gogs. Both are single-executable Go applications that offer much of the same functionality GitHub offers.
On the other-hand, this project looks interesting: https://pijul.org/
Pijul is claiming a number of features that make me think it might be worth checking out.
edit, removed this first sentence: The title is misleading as Git is open-source.
And a better name ;-)
I think fossil is pretty darn neat in that regard, however some of the implementation choices come off as esoteric after dealing with the git ecosystem for a while. Other than that fossil feels like it has some nice ideas which haven't been effectively explored by other SCM offerings, though unfortunately they haven't been totally explored by fossil devs either (IMO). Stuff like working with issues in the repository is nice, but the command line interface that fossil presents to work with them is very clunky.
If fossil had gotten to the point of critical mass before git then I'm sure these sorts of issues would have been handled, but since it didn't we're somewhat stuck with what's currently available.
There have been a number of independent efforts to tackle all of these problems but they've lost steam for the past 5 years or so. It's too bad since it's a pretty neat problem space to see solutions built in and to discuss them, but that seems to be the current state of things.
There's no term for "git + issue tracker + wiki + pull request manager + web presence + access controls + organizational tools" that GitHub represents at the moment. Fossil checks a couple more boxes in that list than Git does, and represents an open-source alternative to GitHub in that sense. That's hard to express in the title, but the title as it stands is misleading at best.
"Fossil - a SQL database based alternative to Git" would be more accurate, but a little less sexy.
https://www.fossil-scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/fossil-v-git.w...
Git is an Open Source project covered by the GNU General Public License version 2 (some parts of it are under different licenses, compatible with the GPLv2). It was originally written by Linus Torvalds with help of a group of hackers around the net.
The name "git" was given by Linus Torvalds when he wrote the very first version. He described the tool as "the stupid content tracker" and the name as (depending on your mood):
Say you have a project hosted on github, pretend github has been purchased by a scary-company, you might imagine you could move your repository elsewhere. You can, but suddenly your issues need to be imported/migrated too.
If you had a fossil-host instead? You could migrate your repository and your issues all at once, and nobody would care.
(Disclaimer: I use github for public projects, and self-hosted gitbucket for private stuff. I don't care that github has changed ownership.)
My organization has churned through several different issue trackers in the last few years. And a lot of that old data is just gone; project owners never bothered pulling Fogbugz tickets into Phabricator or never pulled Phabricator tasks into JIRA. If we had issue tracking that lived alongside the source code in version control, then the underlying data would last as long as the code did.
Also I've been wanting to dive deeper into Fossil for a while. Will try it now...
As a native English speaker I'd say that's a perfectly reasonable interpretation. And I think most would have assumed that interpretation had it not been for the MS/Github news.
I posted the link (and accompanying title or headline) and your interpretation of the title (now changed) is exactly what I intended to convey.
Self-hosting Git with ticketing system, wiki, and web front-end can be a giant pain, depending on what you need and how you do it. Fossil is stupidly easy, by contrast. Sure, there are some tools out there to make self-hosting Git with all the trimmings easier, but so far I haven't dealt with one that is actually as easy to host as Fossil.
Basic shared hosting with the ability to store repository files and run CGI is enough to self-host Fossil with all the trimmings. Thus, this isn't about replacing Git, per se. It's about replacing GitHub, for at least some people's use cases.