And since that day, not one looked at Fossil the same way, at least not the same way they looked at git
https://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.o...
I can't tell for sure how much of impact this had on fossil's adoption, its hard to beat git no matter how good you are, but I think it was a bit hit
1) No, it didn't. Please read the part of the thread after Zed's initial panic attack.
2) To the best of our[1] knowledge, fossil itself has never caused a single byte of data loss. When fossil checks in new data, it reads that data back (in the same SQL transaction the data was written in) to ensure than it can read what it wrote with 100% fidelity, so it's nearly impossible to get corrupted data into fossil without going into the db and massaging it by hand. People have lost data by storing their only copy of a repository on failing/failed storage or on a network drive, but no software can protect against hardware failure and nobody in their right mind tries to maintain an active sqlite db over a network drive (plenty of people do it, despite the repeated warnings of anyone who knows anything about sqlite, and they have only themselves to blame when it goes pear shaped). Fossil makes syncing to/from a remote copy absolutely trivial, so any failure to regularly sync copies to a backup is end-user error.
[1] = the fossil developers.
> Let me put it this way. Suppose you’ve got Zed Shaw. No, wait, say you’ve got “a person.” (We’ll call this person “Hannah Montana” for the sake of this exercise.) And you look outside and this young teen sensation is yelling, throwing darts at your house and peeing in your mailbox. For reals. You can see it all. Your mailbox is soaked. Defiled. The flag is up.
> Now, stop and think about this. This is a very tough situation. This young lady has written one of THE premiere web servers in the whole wide world. Totally, insanely RFC complaint. They give it away on the street, but everyone knows its secretly worth like a thousand dollars. And there was nothing in that web server that hinted to these postal urinations.
Still an impressive bug – but the first rule of “my CVS has broken” is “stop running commands, and copy the CVS directory somewhere else”. (I've needed to do this to a .git twice.) Had he done this, he wouldn't've lost work. While he shouldn't've had to, “stop doing everything and take a read-only copy” is the first step when any database containing important data has corrupted.
I finally gave Fossil a serious try last year for a few months, just on my own but I don't think my opinions would change if I tried in a team setting. I still love the idea, but the execution is... ghetto. Serviceable, certainly, but ghetto is the best overarching description I have for it. You have to be willing to look past a lot of things, sure many of them are petty, in order to take it over dedicated polished services for the things it combines. And git+[choice of issue tracker]+[choice of forum]+[choice of wiki]+[choice of project website]+etc. is the real competition against Fossil, not git+nothing, so even if it was better on the pure version control bits it would still be a tough battle. (Not to mention the elephant git+github is a pretty good kitchen sink on its own if you don't want to think about choices and have something serviceable that's also a lot less ghetto.)
I also realized how much I love git's staging area concept once it was gone -- even when I had to use Perforce a lot, at least Perforce has the concept of pending changelists so you have something similar. I've never been a big fan of git's rebase, but it's also brought up a lot as a feature people are unwilling to give up, and I see the appeal. In summary, I think the adoption issue is just that people who do eventually give it a shot find usability issues/missing functionality they aren't willing to put up with.
I think that this is only true for some projects. For some people, the ease of self hosted setup (one executable) and the fact that you can change the documentation, edit code and close bugs offline is a big win that no centralized service can compete with.
For project management I'm less familiar with the options out there but I'd be surprised if there was nothing that gives a really stellar offline experience. I'd give a preemptive win to Fossil on the narrow aspect that your issue tracking changes can be synced and merged automatically with a collaborative server when you come back online, whereas if you stood up your own instance of Trac for instance I'm not sure if they have any support for syncing. If you're working by yourself, though, then there's no problem, Trac and many others work just like Fossil and stand up a local server (or are dedicated standalone programs) and work the same whether you're offline or online. But when I'm working solo I prefer low-tech over anything that resembles Jira (and I don't even really dislike Jira) -- I've played with https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue as another offline/off-platform option but in my most recent ongoing solo project I'm quite happy with a super low-tech issues text file that has entries like (easy to make with https://github.com/dhruvasagar/vim-table-mode)
+--------------+
| Add thing |
+==============+
| Done whens / |
| other info |
+--------------+
> I just cloned your repo. Everything is working fine. Breath, Zed.
seems like he panicked and made it worse, then rage-quit
I understand both that he is and why he is such a polarizing figure. Just wanted to put my positive anecdote on the pile, since they seem to be a less common when he comes up in online comments.