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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