Every now and then i'm using a tool which i just happen to use all the time, and suddenly it dawns on me how useful the tool really is, how much i rely on it, and how much i would miss it if it just disappeared today. Though i've been a power user since the early 1990's, i can count on one hand the tools which have (or have had, R.I.P. qedit.exe) that effect on me. Fossil, of course, is one of those. i've tried git, the do-everything/anywhere/anyhow (except, apparently, hosting over CGI) power-tool, and _every time_ i get write access on a git repo, i get it into a screwed up state within a few hours, requiring a delete/checkout or administrator assistance to get it straightened out. True story: one of the primary maintainers of libgit2 (his name will be elided) once sat for an hour at my desk getting my tree back in order after i had somehow screwed up the commit history state from my client. If the git maintainers require that much energy to fix client-induced problems then the tool is obviously flawed in some fundamental way (no flame intended, but that is my personal experience). Fossil, on the other hand, is (again, in my experience) as solid and easy-to-use as it gets. Yes, i read all the mailing list posts, so i see the problems some people have had with it, but the vast majority of them end up getting resolved quickly (often more quickly than my git snafus) and often with no code changes. One of my favourite maxims of software design is, "make it easy to use correctly and difficult to use incorrectly," and fossil does both. git, from my perspective, would seem to follow the "if it was hard to write it should be hard to use!" philosophy.
If i were a praying man i'd be adding Fossil and Richard and the other active maintainers to my prayers every night. As it is, though, i can just offer my thanks, my moral support (it's been a long while since i've contributed any code to fossil), and my own flavour of arm-chair evangelism (such as posts like this one). Happy Hacking! -- ----- stephan beal http://wanderinghorse.net/home/stephan/
_______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
