Hesitating between git and fossil

Question

Newbie to Fossil (or any other version control system) here. Used a proprietary one earlier, but never set one up myself.

Currently, I am looking to set one up so that my friends and I can use it for a project.

I chose Fossil primarily because distributed seems to be the way to go, it seems lightweight and has an included bugtracker. But Git seems to be the favoured SCM for a lot of people. Is it worth the added complexity to favour Git+someBugTracker over Fossil? Are there any better alternatives? I will have to start from 0 on all.

Answer 1

Just some thoughts, not organized.

If your friends are already used to gitting, Git is a good and robust distributed SCM, with great hosting services available, like Github or Gitorious.

Though, Git concepts are not easy to comprehend. Fossil has similar concepts, but is probably easier to start with (no staging area, no concept of index, reverting changes since last commit with revert not reset or checkout, etc). There are not a plethora of subcommands with plethoras of options, help is concise and clear. If you are afraid that you might be lost choose fossil. Of course, this also means that with fossil you can't do as many things as with git (no rebasing for example, at least not for the moment).

For fossil, there are few hosting online services available. It is as easy as it is with Git to setup a server to run Fossil.

Also, with Fossil, the history of a project is stored in a single file, thus I find it really easy to backup all projects: put all repositories in the same folder, and make a single rsync task. However this makes incremental backups totally useless.

While with git, working on two branches on the same projects in different folders would mean have two copies of the entire project history and branches in two distinct .git/objects directories that may be redundant and huge, with Fossil the default working scheme is have to have one single repository, and one or more working directories connected to it. Maybe if disk usage is important this will matter.

Warning, Fossil bug tracker (ticket system in the jargon) and wiki are quite rudimentary (though, they work well).