Fossil – Simple, high-reliability, distributed software configuration management

I use fossil; like it a lot.<p>If you use&#x2F;would like to use fossil, you might also want to take a look at <a href="http://chiselapp.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;chiselapp.com</a><p>It&#x27;s a bit github-ish; online repository hosting, private or public, and free. (I&#x27;d happily pay, but they don&#x27;t provide even a donation page. So: thanks!)

What do we mean by SCM?<p>It seems to be that &quot;software configuration management&quot; should be about configuring a program, whereas &quot;source code management&quot; should be about managing source code.<p>Which is Fossil?

Sqlite uses this for their SCM. It makes sense as this is a good test of sqlite itself.

A bit of history:<p>DR Hipp, who created SQLite, created a wonderful bug tracking system and wiki for it, called CVSTrac, with the moto &quot;low ceremony defect tracking&quot; that was tied to CVS. It was wonderful - I had used it in my CVS days. It was written in C, based on SQLite, was fast and just worked.<p>Trac was inspired by CVSTrac, but is written in Python, is not tied to CVS, is slower but much more capable and much more flexible (although still &quot;low ceremony&quot; compared to e.g. Bugzilla).<p>Fossil is DR Hipp&#x27;s version control system, which integrates content version tracking, wiki and issue tracking (low ceremony CVSTrac-alike adapted for fossil)<p>I haven&#x27;t had a chance to use it - last time I looked at it, it was missing crypto parts that are essential in some of the projects I work on. But if Fossil gets crypto done right, or if I stop needing it done right, I will definitely give fossil a try.

I&#x27;m all-for supporting alternative solutions, particularly in the VCS space. SVN is not great for some tasks, but for some its still superior. Git is very popular but still not ideal for some workflows&#x2F;project types. Mercurial is oftentimes a more approachable alternative to Git, but has less mindshare.<p>Personally I think variety should be embraced. Let each project use the VCS that works for it&#x27;s specific needs&#x2F;developers.<p>With this mindset, while I would have no issue supporting and making use of something like Fossil (assuming it&#x27;s reliable), I would absolutely discourage the use of it&#x27;s wiki and ticket systems, in favour of independent solutions that are not tied to the repo and repo software itself.

I like using Fossil for my personal projects. I don&#x27;t always use every feature, but it&#x27;s all very small and self-contained and I can just copy the executable into the project root without having to worry about the system environment.

Since so many smart people interested in DVCS are looking anyway: anyone knows whats happening to veracity scm? QA has been offline for months.<p>It was really promising but now seems more or less abandoned.

I used Fossil for a while, and I liked it a lot. But after using it with my team, and having to host it internally (something I didn&#x27;t have the time to do properly being a startup), and programmers complaining about the conflict resolution process, we moved our projects over to git&#x2F;GitHub. Honestly, I haven&#x27;t looked back, even though I much preferred Fossil&#x27;s simplicity.

I had this idea for years - to integrate wiki and tickets with source control. Probably I will like Fossil.

Zed Shaw uses Fossil in his Peepcode Play by Play episode. If you have a subscription to Peepcode (now Pluralsight[1]) you can listen to him talk about it and why he likes it.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.pluralsight.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pluralsight.com&#x2F;</a>

Looks crazy compared to checking &#x2F;etc into git.

The first thing I notice is how ugly the website is - if this reflects at all upon how ugly the scm is (and it may well not), the it&#x27;s not going to gain traction.