From Git to Fossil

Fossil is extremely frustrating to me. There are so many parts that I'm drawn to, but then are there showstoppers that prevent real adoption (by me). I've used it in earnest a number of times. Their immutability stance is at the root of the problems. Lack of rebase is most infamous, but you can't even edit a ticket description! Make a typo or error in the description, and you're expected to append more notes, or delete and recreate the ticket.

I really love the idea of a powerful, shrink-wrapped scm + ticketing etc. system, and I'm a sqlite fan, but fossil hasn't worked out for me.

IMHO the best and most relevant part of fossil these days is the ticket system, which is in every single way almost completely ideal for coding agents. Some features are: single-binary, in-repo, CLI or web UI, and offline / sql / markdown-friendly.

Since the whole tracker is just a thin front on sqlite with the above features there's many options. Use it per-project persistently so as to include co-workers, or only locally for your own agents to "think" inside of so they are less likely to dump CoT all over the code-comments. Use it even at a per task granularity, and throw it away afterwards. Do all three, fossil doesn't care! And the agents will love it.

> If you are among the unfortunate ones who have their master branch named as "main" this option is not for you and you should check Fossil's documentation if you want to rename it.

oh great, another weirdo

I honestly think the article misinterpreted the Git mailing list email.

The first line of the article says:

"People at Git has started to work on a proposal to make the Rust programming language mandatory."

This sounded to me like all future code would need to be Rust.

But the Git mailing list email says:

"Announce that Git 3.0 will make Rust a mandatory part of our build infrastructure."

Also, the original Git mailing list email says:

"[author is porting to Rust the...] "varint.c" subsystem, mostly because it is trivial and does not have any dependencies."

So, the email on the Git list says they are testing changing a small piece of C code to Rust, and Rust build tools will be mandatory [to build] (which is not surprising if a non-optional part of the code base is Rust).

I love Fossil and I use it for my projects. I understand why it isn't for everyone, but considering I am the sole developer on the stuff I make (and I agree with Dr. Hipp about the drawbacks of rebase), it's perfect for my needs. Lightweight, has its own integrated web server and forge features should I need them, and it's dead easy to use. It isn't the one VCS to rule them all (no such thing exists, really), but I do encourage people to check it out because they might fall in love like I did.

(2025).

This is by far the most perplexing part of this article for me:

> People at Git has started to work on a proposal to make the Rust programming language mandatory. I don't like Rust and, above all, I don't like its community of little extremist characters who are trying to make everyone swallow their crap by rewriting projects that have been working for decades, doing social media brigading, and other nice little gems worthy of any tiny group with totalitarian delusions. That's why when I see that a project aims to "force" the use of or the switch from C to Rust, to the extent of my possibilities, I flee from it as if I were pursued by the Balrog of the Lord of the Rings with his whip.

I've been programming for a longish time, and I've acquired my own set of opinions about programming languages, but I can't think of any that I dislike so strongly that I would need to boycott projects that use them under the hood. Moreover, even if we accept the "community of little extremist characters" claim for the sake of argument, is that at all relevant to the Git situation? I haven't seen any evidence that introducing Rust into the code base is the result of extremism, rather than just a mundane technology choice. Finally, when Rust is made "mandatory," it does not mean you must use Rust now, it just means that Rust is required to build the source code. The vast majority of people wouldn't even know that Rust was used. Even most Git developers wouldn't need to use Rust, since after more than a year from the original proposal, the Git source tree is still almost entirely written in C and shell scripts, and the amount of Rust code is basically a rounding error.

The whole Rust issue seems like a big nothingburger, and this reaction seems completely irrational to me.