I'm just a Fossil user, not a developer. Don't want to intrude, just share my thoughts from that perspective.
I work on open source as well as closed source commercial stuff. It's usually relatively small projects, maybe a few hundred KLOC each. When I had to select a VCS, I looked at all the usual suspects and then settled on Fossil. Basically, because it was simple. Simple to install, simple to use, simple to maintain. It had (almost) everything I needed, including the bug tracking and the wiki, which makes project management a breeze. If someone wants more in-depth access to the projects than what they can get through the web interface, they can install Fossil in about 5 minutes. If they have the slightest clue about distributed version control, they will be able to clone, check out and check in stuff after a few hours of digging around. If I wanted to give git access to these projects, I would have chosen git. There are people who keep their projects on git, others on CVS and on whatever. If I want to get involved, I have to install and learn to use git or CVS. This is the same with Fossil. Only that learning Fossil is actually less work. From my perspective, as a humble user, there are quite a handful of things that could improve Fossil, like merging between branches on a file by file basis (which, I believe, git can easily do), more capable Tcl stuff (where the Tcl engine has more access to data as well as operations). Not to mention proper documentation, however boring it is to write it. But Fossil being able to be Git and CVS and half a dozen other version control systems simultaneously is most certainly not a feature I miss. Fossil being able to do things that git can and Fossil can't would be a lot more important to me. Of course I'm just one user with my particular circumstances and goals. But I believe Fossil serves a niche. It is a clean, lean yet reasonably capable and efficient tool, quite good for relatively small projects. Adding unnecessary complexity to its innermost workings would open the door to a maintenance hell, I think. Regards, Zoltan _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
