Dear all,
I've enjoyed reading about the Github vs Fossil discussion. There's been
some passionate and provocative statements :)
What its done for me is make me think again about how we manage our
source code control which is always good. We very recently moved from
our existing text based RCS system to a privately hosted Git system. I
know RCS is possibly older than the average reader on this mailing list,
but it works very well for us and the workflow 'just works'. Until
recently we haven't needed anything more so why change.
RCS started showing its age as we have moved to more and more people
working out of the office more and more, often with no internet access,
and we became more distributed. So after an extensive checking of the
various SCM systems out there, which lasted almost a whole hour, we
decided to try out Git on a private server. Private servers are pretty
cheap and we didn't want to pay Github. We were also acutely aware that
business models change on a whim and we didn't want to be tied into
Github financially (small though it might be) and technically.
We have spent a month looking at how we use Git and we don't feel a 100%
happy with it, mind you 75M other people seem to think its OK, but this
mailing list started us thinking about Fossil. This mailing list has
always been a source of accurate (and sometimes passionate) information.
It has rarely (never?) had much 'fluff' in it. (Fluff is a English
phrase meaning ephemeral or lightweight). Whilst I may not agree with
everything or even understand most of the SQL, the quality is very, very
high and when people state something, its normally worth listening to.
We tend to lurk rather than contribute as other people know SQLite far,
far better than we do. If you have any Perl questions please ask :)
It's pretty easy to setup Git on a VPS, took an hour or so before we had
it going and it started well. What we then found was that the
documentation and the commands were exceptionally confusing. It appeared
to us that most of the documentation seems self referential and we kept
going round and round in circles trying to understand why something was
written the way it was. Even though 75M people seem to use Git, it was a
struggle to understand it. We except that it might be us, but we felt
like we were walking through treacle.
The next issue we found was that large binary files can be problematic.
We have started making Twitter video ads to promote our apps. In the
interest of fairness and not to self advertise I won't promote them here
:) However we have 20GB of video and pictures we've created over the
last few months. It's amazing how much space (and time) can be taken up
with this sort of thing. We found that by itself Git doesn't really like
binary files that much and that you tend to need an extension to handle
Large Binary Files. There also appears to be different extensions to
handle this sort of stuff which is painful to work out which is the best
system. It could also be that we simply haven't got the hang of Git.
So we started looking again at Fossil and like what we saw. We have no
emotional commitment to Git, we want an easy to use SCM that works with
Emacs (I know, I know), and runs on Linux and Macs. Fossil looks like it
might fit the bill. There's an Emacs mode so that box is ticked, there's
a command line mode, so thats easy, the command set seems to be
orthogonal which is important.
The one area we struggled with is how we might handle large binary files
(video files). These are made in Final Cut Pro X (FCPX), please don't
get us started on the backup capability of FCPX,, Screenflow, an
excellent video editing system that doesn't try to do what FCPX does,
but does 'simple' videos very well and is fantastically quick to work
with, Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. None of these really produce
XML files so are genuine binary files. It appears that Fossil seems to
handle binary files
(https://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/trunk/www/fileformat.wiki)
but we struggled to work out how these really work. We'd be very
interested in peoples experiences here with Fossil with large binary
files (300MB). It would be great to have a single repository where we
can store text files, binary files and have these managed easily.
Am aware that this discussion might be better on the Fossil mailing
list, but since there's so much information on here, we thought we'd ask
this group first.
Thanks very much for reading,
Rob
On 26 Dec 2017, at 22:47, Jungle Boogie wrote:
On Tue 26 Dec 2017 3:08 PM, Damien Sykes wrote:
Hi,
This is a question I have asked myself many times (I.E. Git projects
moving
to Fossil).
GitHub is well known and boasts over 74 million repositories, yet
Fossil,
which both hosts and utilises one of the most well-known database
systems in
the world, I doubt can count a thousand. Even the ChiselApp hosting
platform
hosts a mere 360 public repositories, Hydra hosts 11, WanderingHorse
hosts
23, outside of which lie Fossil itself, the Fossil book, SQLite and
friends
(5 publicly accessible repositories in all), and TCL and friends (7
repositories), making a total of 408. Add SQLite private
repositories, and
private repositories that I host, have access to or otherwise
generally know
exist, and I come up with an estimate of roughly 470 repositories. Of
course
this is not an accurate statistic since it may exclude more private
repositories, and definitely excludes any local repositories (I for
one have
about a dozen Git repositories as Fossil repositories).
I understand that github's numbers are larger, but is that figure
including unique repos and forks, because of pull requests? For
instance,
we already know of at least two sqlite repos on github from this
mailing
list.
Some repos are junk and so are the user accounts. I.e. accounts made
by
bots for whatever reasons. Some contain very little data. Some are
from
very large companies, i.e. google/facebook/netflix/microsoft.
It's kinda funny that git is a decentralized repo but github is quite
centralized.
While I am making every attempt to try to persuade friends towards
Fossil,
they are also choosing Git. Looks to me like the only people who seem
to use
Fossil are those who are most associated with it, which is a real
shame.
Yes, that's quite a good point, but I don't know how to turn that
corner
and have it more mainstream.
The only advantage I can see with GitHub is that it's the source code
Twitter equivalent. Everybody's repository is in one place. As long
as you
know the username and repository name you know the full repository
URL, and
you don't have to worry about server administration.
I'm not so concerned about the server admin aspect of fossil, but I do
understand if your twitter handle matches your github repo name, it
can
make things easier, but this also goes to my statement above - it's
ironic that github is very large and for distributed.
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