Sam Hames

Fossil: Home

A distributed version control system, built by for and with Sqlite. Especially notable, is that it started contemporaneous with many other systems (git especially, but also darcs, bazaar, mercurial and monotone), but still remains under active development. My impression is that git (and github) "won", and of everything else only mercurial is still really active.

Notable differences from defacto git:

• integrates a Web UI right into the binary
• incorporates ticketing and wiki right into the repository
• includes a forum and a chat!
• design use case seems to be aimed at small tight-knit teams supporting a larger group of users (ie SQLite)
• good news: self hosting looks feasible. Bad news: unless you're happy using the one hosted service you're going to have to self host.
• opinionated about not rewriting history (though there are some things enabled that can't even be expressed in git, like having multiple branches with the same name)

Differences from github (note, not criticisms, it's just interesting how the SQLite team approaches things):

• no out of the box integration with CI systems (the suggested architectures are all pull based)
• no pull requests/no code review on pull requests