Hi Terry,

Fossil has many good features that made me look at, contribute to and 
use it as personal VCS.

However, fossil is created and maintained out of personal interest. It 
does not intent to become a next-gen DVCS system replacing git or 
others. The idea is: If you like it, use it.

- Altu


-----Original Message-----
From: shards2...@yahoo.com
To: Fossil <fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org>
Sent: Fri, Feb 19, 2010 5:30 am
Subject: [fossil-users] Fossil, first impressions


I really liked trying out Fossil and it may become my personal vcs - 
the integrated wiki and ticket system are great and I use RamDebugger 
once in awhile, too - but I was initially evaluating it for work use, 
where our Subversion setup is turning into a giant space hog.  I have a 
(growing) repository that is about 2 gigs checked out, 1 gig exported 
and the initial import into Fossil rocked because it was only about 250 
megs.   

However, we need partial checkout ability and Fossil just recreates the 
whole exported repo when it is opened, thus defeating one selling point 
of finding a tool that uses less space. (It would save some server 
space, just not enough to justify introducing a whole new tool and it 
would actually force the programmers to use more disk space as near as 
I can tell - and mine isn't the only repo they use.)  Even though I am 
the department support admin, I can't break the repo up since we have 
multiple projects under the trunk, tags, branches default layout and 
Subversion is administered by the server teams, which limits options 
there - like implementing SVK to make Subversion usable.  

The other feature I was looking at was the tagging.  The engineers I 
work for are unhappy with SVN because they are being forced on to it 
 from Clearcase, and they really miss the ability to label individual 
files (most of you probably know that SVN operates at the folder level 
- we had hopes that the new change set capability would be an 
alternative but it wasn't).  I like how Fossil does leaves and 
branching but again the issue of no lite working copy, or partial 
checkouts is a deal breaker.  While space is a big concern, keeping 
users out of some projects is even more important.       

So the search continues.  Bazaar comes close but it's been too unstable 
on Windows every time I've tried it, git on Windows - well, enough said 
there, it was pretty painful when I tested it 6 months ago.         

Most of the open source version control systems I have tested say up 
front that they are built on the initial developers needs.  As nice as 
Fossil is, I was disappointed that it isn't any different in that 
respect. But I'll keep an eye on the open Feature Requests (for partial 
co)  to see if that changes.    

If I've overlooked any obvious workarounds while trying it out, please 
let me know.   

-- Terry
 


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