The Open Source U

Fossil SCM

When I had really discovered DVCS a while back, I didn’t really notice fossil and for that I’m sorry.

I think it is a (for my purposes) viable DVCS in which I’d given consideration before diving in to use Mercurial (although it is a great system and I’ve had no issues with it). Some of the features of fossil are appealing, such as having the bug tracker integrated or the help wiki integration. Obviously this won’t work for all projects, but I think it has potential.

What is particularly interesting is that the site at fossil-scm.org is actually fossil serving itself. Consider the URL when you visit the home page: “http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/index.wiki”  It’s a wiki page. If you click on a few of the links in the link-bar, I think you’ll see what I mean. The site is it’s repository — or rather the repository contains the site. While this is arguably a good and bad thing, I can find it’s appeal. It’s certainly a new step (for me) in the management of a project.

While I certainly would never migrate all my Mercurial repositories to fossil for the time being, I am strongly considering using fossil for a class project I’ll be completing for SE-450. If for nothing else but to learn more about fossil and to gain insights in to it’s use as it compares to Mercurial. Fossil is suited to some things and Mercurial is suited to some things. Perhaps it’s time to actively use two different VCS depending on my project needs…

More inf o at: http://www.fossil-scm.org/