On 14/03/15 03:01, Warren Young wrote:
On Mar 13, 2015, at 6:40 AM, Graeme Pietersz <[email protected]> wrote:
My reply to this turned out to be rather long and a bit of rant, so I turned it
into a blog post.
Some critiques:
1. The post is visually divided into two sections, pro-Fossil and pro-Git, but
the actual prose frequently intermixes positives of both. You should separate
the two. Cover all the things that are great about Fossil in the first
section, then explain in the second why you choose to use Git despite Fossil’s
advantages.
The biggest example of this is your 2-point numbered list in the first section.
If it were my post, I’d just fold these two points into the “one big advantage”
section following the pro-Fossil section.
If you’d rather discuss tools and services in a separate section, that’s fine,
but as it is, your post feels more like a brain dump than reasoned exposition.
Good point. My intention was that the first section would explain why I
thought Fossil by itself was better for most people, and the second
would explain why Git's bigger ecosystem and all those tools and
services changed things for many people. I need to think about how best
to arrange this.
2. Linux is not “the largest software project ever.” Not even close. Windows’
code base is ~3 times larger. Visual Studio and MS Office are each about twice
as large as Linux. The highly-successful Alcatel-Lucent 5ESS telephone
switching system was last reported to clock in at over 100 MSLOC. [1]
Healthcare.gov was reported at 500 MSLOC, making it about 28x bigger! [2]
That has been corrected - see my response to earlier comments on this. I
worded it extremely badly and should not have used the word "project".
3. I rarely use Git, and never speak more than pidgin Git to it, so perhaps I
am just ignorant about some fact about the Git GUI situation, but I can’t see
why you ding Gitk but then later in the post praise Gitg. It feels like you’re
going out of your way to find bad things about Git which have been fixed
elsewhere. Is there a good reason not to just ignore the existence of Gitk?
Yes, because Gitk is the nearest thing to a default GUI for Git. It is
developed as part of the same project, and the man page says it is
developed in the main git repository. It is part of Git in a way things
like Gitg are not.
I’m all for Fossil boosting, but I don’t see a reason to manufacture negatives
for Git. It already has enough genuine negatives to sink it, in my book. :)
I was not particularly intending to boost Fossil.
4. Regarding email integration, I don’t blame Fossil for not tackling this one.
The hosted VCS services have an advantage in that their sysadmins work out how
to connect up to the public email system.
Even at its best — as seen in popular GUI email programs — an email server
connection can be difficult to set up. To even get that far, you have to write
a whole lot of automated probing code to work out which security features some
particular email server has, whether the username has an @ sign in it or not,
whether it wants incoming email on port 25, 587, 465, 475, or 2525, etc. Email
is a hot mess.
My point is that you’re kind of mixing apples and oranges here, as well as in
other areas. Your comparison should separate Git vs Fossil from
ChiselApp/self-hosting vs Github.
Yes, I know, ChiselApp still doesn’t compare to Github, so Git will continue to
come out on top in that comparison. However, this is still the only fair
comparison. Also, I believe that once you extract the hosting services from
the comparison, Fossil comes out quite a bit ahead of Git.
Even without hosted services, Git still has integration with the likes
of Trac and Redmine, and , as James Moger pointed out, things like
Gitlab, all of which you can host yourself.
These do have email notifications, better ticket tracking, and nice
wikis so I think Git comes out ahead in user friendliness after setup,
Fossil in ease of setup. It is not a matter of blame, but of a real
disadvantage.
I do think it fair to compare Fossil to Github etc., because it is
supposed to be an all in one solution, so how, for example, its ticket
system compares to alternatives is relevant.
5. You’re missing one of Fossil’s advantages: truly private project hosting, as
opposed to “We think it’s private, but there hasn’t been a publicized hack on
Github yet” semi-private hosting. A lot of organizations are going to be
unwilling to pay for “private” hosting at Github or BitBucket for that reason
alone. That’s true here, for one.
What exists in the Git world to compare to Fossil as a private, self-contained,
all-in-one service?
James Moger already answered that question, and as I pointed out above
things like Trac and Redmine can be integrate with git and I mention
these in the post. I think I will edit it to add a references to things
like Gitlab.
6. There are cases where Fossil’s single-executable philosophy really matters.
The ones I’ve run into amounted to cross-compiling: it’s easier to build an ARM
executable for a Chromebook or Raspberry Pi and copy just that across than to
set up a whole cross-compilation toolchain complete with shared libraries,
package managers, etc., then ship some massive bolus-of-code over to the other
platform and unpack it there. You don’t always get the luxury of building on
the target platform. ChromeOS doesn’t even come with compilers.
In the case of the Pi, Git and Fossil (and Mercurial and Bazaar and
more) are in the Raspbian repos. So is gcc so I imagine you could
compile the latest version on the Pi itself if you wanted to.
ChromeOS seems to be rather an odd choice for a development machine, and
if you are not using it for development why would you want to install a
DVCS on it? Is this really a common problem?
[1] That’s probably significantly outdated by now.
[2] Of course, it probably collapsed under its own weight, but still...
_______________________________________________
fossil-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
_______________________________________________
fossil-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
