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File www/qandc.wiki part of check-in [5cbfe0cde2] - Minor edits to the Questions and Criticisms document. by drh on 2008-10-06 11:28:32.

Questions And Criticisms

This page is a collection of real questions and criticisms that have been raised against fossil together with responses from the program's author.

Fossil sounds like a lot of reinvention of the wheel. Why create your own DVCS when you could have reused mercurial?

I wrote fossil because none of the other available DVCSes met my needs. If the other DVCSes do meet your needs, then you might not need fossil. But they don't meet mine, and so fossil is necessary for me.

Feature provided by fossil that one does not get with other DVCSes include:

Integrated wiki.

Integrated bug tracking

Immutable artifacts

self-contained, stand-alone executable

simple, well-defined, enduring file format

Why should I use this rather than Trac?

Fossil is distributed. You can view and/or edit tickets, wiki, and code while off network, then sync your changes later. With Trac, you can only view and edit tickets and wiki while you are connected to the server.

Fossil is lightweight and fully self-contained. It is very easy to setup on a low-resource machine. Fossil does not require an administator.

Fossil integrates code versioning into the same repository with wiki and tickets. There is nothing extra to add or install. Fossil is an all-in-one turnkey solution.

Love the concept here. Anyone using this for real work yet?

Fossil is self-hosting. In fact, this page was probably delivered to your web-browser via a working fossil instance. The same virtual machine that hosts http://www.fossil-scm.org/ (a Linode 720) also hosts 24 other fossil repositories for various small projects. The documentation files for SQLite are hosted in a fossil repository here, for example. Other projects are also adopting fossil. But fossil does not yet have the massive user base of git or mecurial.

Fossil looks like the bug tracker that would be in your Linksys Router's administration screen.

I take a pragmatic approach to software: form follows functions. To me, it is more important to have a highly reliable, fast, efficient, enduring, and simple DVCS than one that looks pretty.

On the other hand, if you have patches that improve the apparance of Fossil without seriously compromising its reliablity, performance, an maintainability, I will be happy to accept them. Fossil is self-hosting. Send me email to request a password that will let you push to the main fossil repository.

It would be useful to have a separate application that keeps the bug-tracking database in a versioned filed. That file can then be pushed and pulled along with the rest repository.

This addressed in the opening paragraphs of the Bug-Tracking In Fossil document.

Fossil is already the name of a plan9 versioned append-only filesystem.

I did not know that. Perhaps they selected the name for the same reason that I did: because a repository with immutable artifacts preserves and excellent fossil record of a long-running project.

The idea of storing a repository in a binary blob like an SQLite database terrifies me.

The use of SQLite to store the database is likely more stable and secure than any other approach, due to the fact that SQLite is transactional. Fossil also implements several internal self-checks to insure that no information is every lost. And, indeed, in over a year of operation, there have been no reports of data loss due to a Fossil malfunction.

I am dubious of the benefits of including wikis and bug trackers directly in the VCS - either they are under-featured compared to full software like Trac, or the VCS is massively bloated compared to Subversion or Bazaar.

I have no doubt that Trac has many features that fossil lacks. But that is not the point. Fossil has several key features that Trac lacks and that I cannot live without: most notably the fact that fossil supports disconnected operation.

As for bloat: Fossil is a single self-contained executable. You do not need any other packages (diff, patch, merge, cvs, svn, rcs, git, python, perl, tcl, apache, sqlite, and so forth) in order to run fossil. Fossil runs just fine in a chroot jail all by itself. And the self-contained fossil executable is much less than 1MB in size. Fossil is the very opposite of bloat.