Hacker News Reader

Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

Well, whatever the article says, isn't the actual reason "we have this other one we built using SQLite"?

I don't get that at all. To me the answer is "we want things out of the vcs that we don't get from git nor github/gitlab."

The fundamental difference is: sqlite is a cathedral, git is for bazaars. That's kind of a big deal.

I can’t recall where, but I think I heard Richard Hipp say that developing Fossil helps the SQLite developers dogfood SQLite. There’s certainly some synergy between the projects.

The reason is they didn't need the complexity of the git model. They came up with their own way of doing it and there's nothing wrong with that.

It does come off as excessively NIH, with the first point even just being a client UI complaint.

Well sqlite is more of a passion project than about doing things in the most capitalistically efficient way right? So "it makes me happy to invent things here that scratch my itches just so" is a valid reasoning.

SQLite is in every phone on the planet and the author has a company that makes money selling it to environments that require extensive validation (eg airplane software).

It's not a "passion project" by any means. It's a highly developed, well engineered piece of software and there's lots of other non "passion projects" that would do well to learn from it.

D. Richard Hipp has mentioned that SQLite and the TH3 test suite were heavily inspired by DO-178B, but none of the core SQLite developers have been involved in a DO-178B certification nor has anyone purchased the TH3 test suite. Furthermore, SQLite by its nature is not fit for hard real-time systems since it cannot guarantee the execution time of an arbitrary query and/or an arbitrary dataset.

I don't mean to disparage SQLite in any way, it is quite the achievement, but your characterization is mistaken.

If the end result weren't so stable and high-quality, I might agree with you. But Fossil has become my VCS for personal projects because I can host a repo-farm trivially through CGI on my webhost, and it includes issues/wiki/forum. This makes me feel like Fossil has carved out a nice niche for itself that provides a real benefit for at least some folks, rather than simply being a reactionary project motivated because git was written elsewhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com