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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

"Git provides file versioning services only, whereas Fossil adds an integrated wiki, ticketing & bug tracking, embedded documentation, and News/Blog features. These additional capabilities are available for Git as 3rd-party user-installed add-ons, but with Fossil they are integrated into the design."

Am I the only one who's actively suspicious about this kind of thing? With Git, I can use whatever wiki, ticketing, documentation, and blog features I want. I don't want my VCS to be a Lotus Notes for software development.

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I would argue that Github has many if not all of those features.

Wiki - check

Ticketing & Bug Tracking - Github has 'issues'

Embedded documentation - include a README file in your repo, and Github immediately shows that under your project

News/Blog features - Github has pages, and automatically generates RSS feeds for your commits.

I'd argue that Github does all these things better than Fossil (or I) can ever do - they have a whole design team constantly worrying about ease-of-use.

But if I want private repositories at github I have to pay!

And if you want Fossil hosted on a web-accessible server you have to pay for that somehow anyway.

If you want to access it from home, you'll need to somehow pay for an internet connection, but you're probably already doing that. :)

Most developers I know are already paying for hosting already -- for pet project sites, personal sites for self/friends/family, for running proxies or experiments, hosting offsite backups, etc. etc..

The single most important feature, however, are pull requests.

Have you ever tried to set up a Gitorious box?

Not that it's difficult (it is) but it is a complete waste of people's time. If I want to fiddle with every aspect of my development tools, maybe I'm not Fossil's target.

Next time I need to set a small coding project (I attend a few OSS hackfests every year), I'll definitely consider Fossil instead of git.

Have you ever tried to set up a Gitorious box?

No, I just use GitHub. Is there a hosted Fossil service that's as easy to use?

When the project allows me to go hosted, then the problem is already solved. Thrice. When it does not, but I still need versioning, a wiki and some issue tracking and I don't feel like sporting my masochist hat, good news for me: there's now a tool that does it all and it's a single binary that needs no setting up.

And I don't know if there's any hosted Fossil service around, easy to use or otherwise.

The only hosted Fossil service I've seen so far (only been investigating Fossil since I read this article) is Chisel: http://chiselapp.com

I have not tried it yet, however, and have no idea how easy it is to use.

> Have you ever tried to set up a Gitorious box?

Yes! :'(

Complicated to set up and complicated to maintain. And its black box approach to storing the repositories on disk - using UUIDs as folder names, doesn't inspire confidence if the complicated card house should fall over.

I'm not saying Gitorious is a house of cards, but it didn't fit the bill for me at all as a person with limited time to fiddle with a source control setup but still want some self hosted repos. Gitolite ftw.

I'd also be suspicious of the integrated features of Fossil, which from a quick look on their site wouldn't be enough to cover what I need anyway. I'd be curious to know what the thought behind integrating everything is. Could be handy for a hackathon or such I suppose?

Could be handy for a hackathon or such I suppose?

That's exactly the scenario I had in mind. I have attended some hack fests myself and, besides the general chaos and lack of coordination, there's the particular issue of how people share code, report issues and write stuff down. Everything is everywhere. It's a mess.

Gerrit is very easy to set up and offers similar capabilities.

"github in a box" is a superb tagline, though. that was my favourite bit in that article.

Given a pile of cash, you can actually buy "github in a box":

http://fi.github.com/

I believe it's JRuby-based.

It is JRuby-based, and they only give you a compiled binary, and it's weeks to months behind the public GitHub site. Aside from those issues, it's really quite nice.

Also to add that Git doesn't track files it tracks content.

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