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Comment by crazydoggers | Hacker News Reader

And also why he stopped using it when it hosed his repo:

http://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.or...

Wow, Richard Hipp is a class act: http://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.or...

> "fossil export | git fast-import" will get your stuff moved over efficiently. Thanks for hanging out with us. I expect you might come back to fossil someday, and if you do you will be welcomed.

Zeds reply is interesting as well:

Yep, that feature is awesome. :-) And yes, I think if it you come to me and say it's all stable now then I'd easily give it a try, but I have to be practical and get shit done.

In other words, it's nothing personal, just business.

A disgruntled Zed Shaw must be how you battle test people's tact and composure.

I can understand the frustration of losing a couple of days of work, but wow, that thread does not show Zed Shaw in a good light. This approach of "there was a bug so now I'm throwing all my toys out of the pram" isn't particularly constructive or mature.

>that thread does not show Zed Shaw in a good light

It seems that Zed Shaw does not show Zed Shaw in a good light. That behavior appears to be the only kind he displays. A single bug that did not delete anything and all his work can be recovered with a single undo command and he wants so badly to turn it into drama, while insisting he's the only reason their program exists.

It deleted his uncommitted code.

I would have done exactly the same thing. He is using a SCM that deleted all its files due to a bug. He tried to recover its deleted files, and it seems the next commands utterly killed any hope of recovery. What was him supposed to do? keep in its mind perfectly the internal state of Fossil after an unknown bug to find which command, if any, could recover its files? I would have panicked, tried every command I could think of and started crying.

After Fossil deleted its files he informs the maintainer of the bug, giving a clear description of what happened, and decides to switch to a more mainstream SCM.

I don't get why you're giving him so much heat. He seems to me constructive (the bug was fixed) and mature (he went to a more mainstream SCM that is less likely to have some kind of "never seen before" bug while you just "make a branch").

For next time:

    cd ..
    cp -R wrkdir backup
    cd wrkdir
    fossil dickitup

> What was him supposed to do?

Use some automated backup tool that had nothing to do with fossil.

We are talking about Zed http://programming-motherfucker.com Shaw right?

wow, for sure I won't wear that t-shirt, I'd be afraid to get myself killed by some myopic officer or something like that

Also the "if it wasn't for me you'd still be four guys on a toy project" quote.

Doesn't seem to be connected to reality. I've heard of Fossil and sqlite, but never of Shaw, who apparently wasn't even a commiter.

You have never heard of "Learn Python the Hard Way", the Mongrel server or "Rails is a Ghetto"?

He used to be important in the Ruby community as the author of Mongrel. But yeah, if it's not massively hyperbolic,it's not Zed Shaw.

There's more to a project than being a commiter. Shaw promoted Fossil, and people (a lot of people have heard of Shaw) looked into Fossil and started using it because of him. In that same thread you'll see someone else on the list spoke up as being one of those people.

That quote you gave is a reaction to the dismissive attitude that non-commiters are somehow second-class citizens; which you've just expressed. It's a bad way of thinking about people.

"...complex sql to remove a spam ticket..."

that was very possible the reason for his woes. Do not EVER manually edit the fossil repo db. That's like hex-editing an MS Word Doc.

It did or he did?

There was a previous bug, and it was fixed then, but Zed decided eventually he can't afford to have it happen again (after losing 3 days of work) so he switched to Git.

Richard Hipp (Fossil's author) was able to reconstruct what happened, more or less, here: http://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.or...

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