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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

Fossil is really nice. I still have some projects (from the pre-Dropbox days) that use it--and that are now archived on it, with 100% fidelity.

Having a single file repository is just amazing.

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I use fossil in the post-Dropbox era by keeping my singular repository file inside Dropbox and my working copies outside of Dropbox. Works great for me. Works infinitely better than a git or mercurial repository where the .git/.hg folders get corrupted when there are file conflicts.

Just set up a git server somewhere. It's not hard. Way better than using Dropbox too.

Why would I do that when Fossil and Dropbox already works for me :)

Sidenote: I use git at work and I absolutely despise it.

Because syncing a monolithic binary file is trickier and more intensive than syncing a bunch of little files, once your repo is big enough. If your git repo was corrupted, you might recover some data. If you corrupt a binary database, good luck with that. Dropbox is also harvesting your data for various purposes. I hope your code isn't valuable, because it could be leaked or stolen by employees of Dropbox. There's also something to be said about using what other people use instead of bizarre niche tools.

Disclaimer: I have used Fossil and it's a decent system for small applications where everyone is on board. But I would not recommend it due to the reasons above.

> Dropbox is also harvesting your data for various purposes. I hope your code isn't valuable, because it could be leaked or stolen by employees of Dropbox.

I always thought the encrypted repositories was a neat feature but never really understood what a use case for it would be. I guess this might be one. https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/encryptedrepos...

> I hope your code isn't valuable, because it could be leaked or stolen by employees of Dropbox.

So... you only host your own repos on your own machines, without any kind of EULA? You do realise that hosting git _anywhere_ requires a degree of trust, right?

The fewer people you have to trust, the better. Personally I would not let anyone else host important code for me. I don't own a business but if I did, I would either host it myself or put up tons of roadblocks for anyone trying to steal my code. It might not be impossible but it would be impractical.

Dropbox has had data breaches before. You have to run their spyware to use it too. This is not a theoretical concern.

The problem is that Dropbox specifically has shown themselves to be unworthy of trust. Remember just last year when they opted everyone into sharing data for AI training purposes without asking? A company that does that is not one I trust with my confidential business information.

I think this is the first time I've seen someone say they outright hate git. Why?

I'm not who you replied to, but I think git is fundamentally insane. It's sufficiently opinionated about how it should be used that if you violate certain customs, it can decide to delete commits that you explicitly created. Despite that, it's not opinionated enough to avoid having a ton of subtly different (or effectively the same) ways of doing a thing on the cli. And the cli is an absolute mess of footguns and inconsistent flags.

That's interesting. I've been using git every day for about 8 years, I've never found myself in a situation where I couldn't fix something I broke. But maybe that time will come.

The usual reasons people hate git are directly resulting from that them not taking time to learn it. If you do know how to use it, you will find it difficult to lose any commits. I suppose the way "reset" has multiple and very different uses is a thorny issue for noobs. But if you just read up when you don't remember, you'll be very safe.

I've had decent results with git in Dropbox, and now in SyncThing. There is nothing that git reset --hard can't fix as long as you keep committing to a server...

A git repo in Syncthing? Wow. You really like to live dangerously.

Have been doing this kind of thing for over a decade to sync between my desktop and laptop(s). No serious data loss, ever.

For what it's worth: I've had excellent success with moving the .git folder outside of dropbox. Simply create a text file, ``.git``, in the folder you want to use, and add a single line: ``gitdir: /abs/path/to/gitdir``. Now you can use your sync provider of choice to shuffle most-recent code between computers as needed, without extra git commits.

The biggest gotcha is that it's not particularly cross-platform-safe, because the file paths might be different.

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