Version control with Fossil [LWN.net]

Version control with Fossil

Posted Mar 18, 2011 14:09 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (guest, #4458)
Parent article: Version control with Fossil

What bothers me is that it is described as "everybody has everything", that can't really be true in a truly distributed environment (see (PDF) Brewer's CAP theorem, which shows that under very mild conditions it is impossible to have Consistency, Availability and Partition tolerance at the same time; unfortunately this is what is usually demanded as "obvious base requirements" of distributed systems). Furthermore, it is said to be suited only for projects that aren't as large as the Linux kernel. Bad news is that that particular project started as a one-man hobby... I've seen too many successful projects starting out with tools "good enough for our limited use", which outgrew them and landed in a world of pain.

Version control with Fossil

Posted Oct 4, 2011 20:14 UTC (Tue) by topher (guest, #2223) [Link]

Regarding the project size, your comparison is more than a little misleading. Yes, Linux started as a one-man hobby. But, from it's outset, it was a Unix-like Operating System Kernel. It's obvious that it has the potential to be a huge project. It's also probably one of the largest single pieces of software out there (where largest is defined as being larger than 99% of software projects by lines of code and number of developers).

Most projects that most people are involved with are, by their nature and design, simply lacking in the potential to ever get that big. In that unlikely (probably 1 in 100,000+) chance that a project does unexpectedly get that big, Fossil supports import and export to Git. So you export your source history to Git, and you keep on going with your (monstrously huge) project.

Also, I would consider SQLite a far from "small" project, and it is using Fossil with great success. Just because Fossil is oriented towards smaller projects, and can't scale up to the Linux kernel, doesn't mean that it isn't more than capable for the vast majority of software projects out there.