It's missing what's sadly the only important difference:
Git: Used by everyone else
Fossil: Not used by everyone else
Everything else is kind of irrelevant. Git is hard to use and awkward to master, but you need to do so anyone to work with everyone else.
I wish it wasn't the case, but network effects are really important. Mercurial was a better DVCS launched around the same time as git but it lost out, not because "worse is better" but the network effects spreading out from the of the linux kernel itself.
I never had a good experience with mercurial from memory. Docs and examples weren't as good (not that Git was hugely better, but network effects had more resources available). I remember the CLI commands being a small bit more intuitive but as someone new to DVCS at the time (as most people would have been) - it didn't really do anything special to help new users get a handle on the mental model for how it works. I remember Facebook publicly using / backing it, was surprised they didn't do more to promote it.
I used Mercurial before Git and found it way more intuitive. I don't have much to say about the documentation, I didn't have a problem with it, but that's not the reason.
It is not just because the CLI is more intuitive, though it plays a big part.
The main reason is that mercurial is more opinionated. On a default setup, only a few commands are available, and none of them let you change the history. If you want more, you have to add an extension. These are built-in, that's just a line in a configuration file, so that's not much of an obstacle, but you have to be deliberate. It gives a natural progression, and it better defines the project organization.
With git, you have everything and the kitchen sink, literally, as it uses the "plumbing" and "porcelain" metaphor. All flavors of merge, rebase and fast forward are available, there is a git-reset command that does a dozen of different things, there is stash, the staging area, etc... The first month or two on git, I was a bit overwhelmed, none of that with Mercurial, and I already had the experience of Mercurial when I switched to git, so I was familiar with the concept of push/pull and DAGs.
Now, I tend to prefer git, though after many years, I still have trouble wrapping my head around the command line sometimes. But that's for the same reason it was so hard to me to get into it. It gives out a lot of freedom and possibilities. For example, I like the fact it is really decentralized, for example in one project the customer had a completely separate central repository we couldn't access, and they couldn't access ours, for security reasons. We worked by exchanging bundle files. At some point we also took advantage of the fact that it is possible to have more than one root commit. Also, almost all mistakes are fixable and it is hard to really lose anything (including secrets, so beware!).
For a video game analogy, Mercurial introduces you to new game mechanics as you progress, while Git makes you start in the middle of the map with all the skills unlocked.
Facebook moved to mercurial because of specific problems related to the size of their monorepo. Moreover the git maintainers were unwilling to work with Facebook to improve git to solve some of these problems. Mercurial was a better fit and was open to the help. But all that said if you don’t have a truly enormous monorepo like Facebook or Google then git is arguably the better tool given the network effects. I don’t think Facebook wanted to promote Mecurial as some vastly superior solution outside because for most people it isn’t.
Facebook moved from subversion to git around 2008. Some of their teams then switched to mercurial around 2014 (I could be wrong by a couple years here or there). By 2014, git was already the main tool everyone was using —- no amount of backing by a single company would have tilted the scales.
I think the massive difference is the number of people using the project vs. contributing to the project. How many people contribute to SQLite vs the Linux kernel. AFAIK not many for the former.
There are plenty of situation in which all that matters is that the people actually building are happy with it and a tool that literally nobody else uses would be fine.
Indeed, for many engineering jobs (software and other) in some industries, it's entirely necessary to create new tools and use extremely specialiased. Good people will learn how to use (and build/improve them).
I'd possibly go as far as arguing that a sign of a good team is willingness to aggressively use the right tool for the job even if it is obscure or something they have to build themselves.
Sure, if you're hoping to get traction with an open source JavaScript library… git and github maybe be pre-requisites, but for projects of a certain sort "reach" and "adoption" by other developers are the most important metric. (Though, SQLite has done just fine with Fossil, so there's probably a degree of overstatement in the idea that it anything has to use git / be on Github.)
I remember when two engineers on our staff at $BIGCORP test-drove Git for a month and then gave a lunch-talk about their impressions for anyone who was curious about it. They were in favor of switching to it for local / team workflows. At the time, there would still be a translation layer back to our pre-Git company repo, but they advocated for the extra overhead for the gains in new workflow possibilities. You can guess what happened next.
Git had only been around for a handful of years at the time. If not for people slowly adopting it a little at a time, thus leading to the network effect, Git would not have become the dominant VCS of the day. So yeah, when things like this, JJ, etc come along, it's worth paying attention and keeping an open mind cause any one of them might be the "everything else is irrelevant," tool in fifteen years.
Gt was not successful because of network effects, but more monkey see monkey do imitation that people are prone to. Whatever is used for big projects must be the best, right?
I have recently returned to Fossil for personal stuff. IMO its better than git for one person projects and small teams. It was designed for a small team. What everyone else uses does not really matter for personal stuff. Nor does it matter if you are working with people willing to try something new. Nor does it matter to someone who can take a decision for a team.
Git kinda requires you to read the git book. But I wouldn't call it "hard to use", once you know how it works most of the things it does are obvious (if occasionally badly named).
And you could probably get rid of like... 90% of things people complain about by just writing better frontend (and some people did that) to same backend
> you need to [use Git] to work with everyone else
Programmers use different operating systems, editors, languages - is there any reason we all have to use the same source control tool? We weren’t doing so before Git came along.
You could make that argument about HTTP, SMTP, Slack, or the English language. It turns out that yes, the actual concrete points of collaborative interaction do need to be standardised to a degree, unless you're thinking of everyone shouting into their particularly flavoured void, with no means of communicating. You can have different clients speaking the same protocol, but you can't have different protocols.
Even before git, you generally had to use what your team was using, or the FOSS project you were trying to contribute to. So it's kind of a moot point.
I used Mercurial before switching to git. The positive difference from switching was how branches worked. I don’t know the technical details but branches on git felt “lighter” to use and maintain than with Mercurial.
"Fossil has inbound and outbound Git conversion features, so if you start out using one DVCS and later decide you like the other better, you can easily move your version-controlled file content."
It matters until it doesn't. Git is the "lingua franca" but increasingly I see team members use only git integrations in the IDE, the web interface (Azure) or say, the Github desktop client.
Those users wouldn't mind switching to Fossil if the graphical interface is reasonably easy to discover and use.
> Mercurial was a better DVCS launched around the same time as git but it lost out, not because "worse is better" but the network effects spreading out from the of the linux kernel itself.
Yeah. I was using Mercurial and, reluctanctly, had to switch to Git. Now don't get me wrong: I was forced to use both CVS and SVN in a thankfully very distant past so I love Git. But I do miss Mercurial. We switched exactly for the reason you mentioned: Git simply won the market.
Git won, Magit is awesome. Then all the Github and whatnots. It's Git, Git and Git.
And never bet against Linus, either: the world runs on Linux (and that's a good thing) and every tech company in the world uses Git. That's just how it is.
Mercurial was a tiny bit better but not that much better that it'd compensate for the entire ecosystem and people gravitating towards Git.
Mercurial was not better. Features like rebase /squash are not native to mercurial (even though they since added extensions for this) and the tool had a very rigid view of the commit history. I had all my projects on Mercurial for several years after using SVN, because it felt more similar to SVN and I had no mental concept of why you'd ever want something so crazy as "rebase" - commit histories looked the way I always remembered them looking with SVN, with tons of tiny commits like "fix comma", "fix syntax", and no steady concept of a commit hash linked to a complete, working change, because that was something I had never seen before. Basically I just didn't get it.
Today my workflow is based on git + gerrit code review (which is heavily based around git), or in other areas github pull requests, and there is no such thing as a series of little commits that all hodge-podge together to form a particular change to the code, we tailor changes to be perfect, we push -f to keep each commit in the series to be a full and CI-tested story of a change, then we squash-merge them. My use with git is 100% all day things that were impossible with Mercurial back when I used it, if there are extensions for these things now, they are afterthoughts, git understood these concepts from the beginning.
As a native son of git, I’m curious what the idiomatic way to maintain a patched fork was without rebase? Would you simply have your “patched” branch and merge in upstream changes as they arrive?
as I recall, you didn't! you just had branches full of dozens of commits for every little bit of the change. yes you'd have to merge continuously to stay up to date.
hg sees history as useful metadata, and therefore you shouldn't dress it up artificially.
git allows for folks to be Pinky's out with their commit history for warm an fuzzies.
If you think editing history is a grand idea that should be used regularly (like with rebase) then I already know you likely haven't been responsible for large mature code base. Where you'd rather have every comment, change and scrap of info available to understand what you're trying to maintain because the folks before you are long gone.
> Everything else is kind of irrelevant. Git is hard to use and awkward to master, but you need to do so anyone to work with everyone else.
People will call me crazy, but you can tell Claude Code what you need with Git on your local repo and it will spit out the terminal incantations, you can also... tell it to run them after you read them.
> Git provides file versioning services only, whereas Fossil adds an integrated wiki, ticketing & bug tracking, embedded documentation, technical notes, a web forum, and a chat service [...]
I like the idea of having all of those within the actual VCS, mostly because with Git you need centralized services like GitHub to provide that.
But I have to ask: Is it really a good idea? Seems like feature creep motivated by the wants of a single project (SQLite).
All of those could be (albeit awkwardly) backed with a git repo and a cron job.
Wiki? Just make a repo with a bunch of Markdown or this-week's-favorate-markup-language files.
Ticketing & bug tracking? Again, just a Markdown file for every ticket.
Embedded documentation & technical notes? Those are just special wiki pages with different attributes.
Forum and chat service? Do you want your VCS to do that? I get being able to hyperlink between files and conversations, but still.
I want it embedded in git simply to break the hold Github has. We have this fantastic distributed fault-tollerant dvcs that gets funneled though at worse 1 service, at best maybe 3 or 4.
I'd love to clone a repo and be able to view all the reasoning behind commits with the context of issues too. I know the commit message should cover this but sometimes it doesn't, or its too much context, or the context is limited to the opinion of the committer. I think all that information is relevant to projects and should have some chance to live alongside it. Stuff like git-bug exists, but then you still need participation from other people.
I really love the idea of radicle.xyz which is git + p2p + issues & patches (called `COB` - collaborative objects) all in your repo but getting the buy-in of the wider population seems extremely difficult, if not impossible. I think part of the attraction here specifically is nostalgia for me, it feels like its invoking the 90s/00s where it was all a big mesh network, information wanted to be free and you couldn't stop the signal.
Fossil also seems cool but the rest of the world is tied to git and I'm tied to jj now. I guess I really wish git themselves [sic] would push something forward, I think that's the only way it would really get broad acceptance. Forges could adopt it and try and special-sauce parts but still let you push/pull "COB"s.
> Stuff like git-bug exists, but then you still need participation from other people.
The plan is to 1) finish the webUI and 2) accept external auth (e.g. github OAuth). Once done, anyone can trivially host publicly their own forge and accept public contribution without any buy-in effort. Then, if user wants to go native they just install git-bug locally.
"Feature creep" is hard to characterize. If the project needs and uses it, is it really "feature creep"?
Or, from Wikipedia, "The definition of what qualifies as "feature creep" varies among end users, where what is perceived as such by some users may be considered practical functionality by others." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep
Hipp (the original SQLite author) also developed his own parser generator (Lemon) and his own editor (e). The former is also used by other projects.
Where do you store the different attributes? In the file-system? How do you manage consistency? Why put up with awkward cron solutions when you have a fully ACID database system right there to work with, which is portable across OSes, including ones which don't have cron?
If it helps any, don't think of it as a VCS but as an SCM system - one which includes version control.
It still looks _exactly_ the same way as a decade ago (well, there were some CSS tweaks). I used to use it for my own projects until friction overcame my tastes, but I remember one of the things I really didn't like about it was that the web interface was _so_ dated. I love Gitea because it feels a lot like GitHub (and hence I don't have to remember where things are).
Edit: Wow, it supports markdown now? and a forum? OK...
Amusingly there exists a "Why SQLite Does Not Use Git" article (https://sqlite.org/whynotgit.html), but there is no corresponding "Why Git Does Not Use SQLite".
Well the big difference is that an sqlite db has to be running. Git repos just exist as long as the files are on disk, which I think is a mental model people are very used to by now.
Sqlite does not have a server component (although there may be other projects that do provide sqlite as a server). Sqlite files are also just files on the disk.
I actually use fossil all the time for my projects. It just makes more sense to me in the way it works and the ease of use. And you can self host your repos with ease, for example [1]
fossil is really cool for the simple fact that you get your issues, tickets and wiki all stored in an SQLite DB. Feels neat and I wish I had more occasions to use it.
The infrastructure around fossil and jujitsu are missing. Git isn't the best but network effects matter.
For example, we use jenkins at work and there is no plugin for fossil or jujitsu.
Every customer we have uses git so we can't even propose fossil. Even though we might use only 10 git commands, those commands are universally known by all to work if something goes wrong.
It isn't sufficient to say that fossil or jujitsu are better. The ecosystem and mindshare for an alternative DVCS is significantly lacking unfortunately.
I spent some time working with jujitsu and found it relatively pleasant... except it doesn't seem at all ready for collaborative use beyond a single working folder.
Sharing the repo state seems impossible without going through the (somewhat painful) multi-step process to tag and push commits into git, and you lose all of the value that jujitsu actually adds (e.g. no evolog, no saved conflicts, no anonymous commits). There is no sharing solution beyond this - no way for me to work on the same working state in two locations beyond rsync the entire folder tree, which is no solution.
A SCM in 2026 that only works locally without being a clunky way of talking to git doesn't seem like a solution ready for prime-time. Maybe the google-internal-only backend systems work better.
My main other pain points were a) zero integration with pre-commit hooks and zero ideas how to do so (yes, CI does this, but it's nice to get all the auto-formatting and sanity checks without pushing, waiting, pulling new commits), and b) Automatically picking up all changes is great except when it doesn't work in which case it is _horrible_ and takes manual unpicking at best. Remembered to add something to .gitignore before doing something in the working directory? Great! Just never ever try to checkout a commit from before you added the .gitignore because now it's permanently absorbed into the repo. Also, if you every accidentally have a secret in your repo directory then that's also permanently in there, as far as I can tell there is no way to manually verify that things are purged and all the commentary on the jujitsu discussion forums were "Just avoid doing this in the first place".
I think this assertion is too vague and arguably wrong. It's unclear which traits would lead a Git alternative to be claimed as better, and even if those traits, if they exist, are relevant. It's also unclear if the tradeoffs of switching tooling away from Git are worth whatever hypothetical benefit there is to be had.
I would make the bold claim that Git is undoubtedly better than any conceivable alternative, and state that the network effect is a consequence and not a side-effect. Anyone is free to try to argue against it by pointing out concrete arguments.
Git is only better in the same sense that Windows is better than Linux. I really need the tools I use that only run on Windows. I prefer Linux for a lot of things, including daily web development, but the experience of developing Unreal Engine on Linux is lacking. I love fossil and the many features it provides in itself and would use it for everything, except that it doesn't have (working) Intellij plugin for integration, a good GitHub alternative, etc.
Brings me back... I did use Fossil in 2010, cf my notes on https://fabien.benetou.fr/Tools/Fossil but like most I only switched due to the popularity of git, not because any specific feature was missing.
I would not want to use fossil at work and I do not know if it could handle projects of that size. Would require manyears of rewriting tools that would not be realistic.
For my hobby projects I have used fossil for several years. It works great and I do not miss anything from git. It's simpler and just nicer to use.
If nothing else I felt like using the same version control system for over 10 years was getting boring. Needed something new to play with. See things from a new perspective. Like playing with a new programming language now and then, even when it is something I do not expect to get much real use out of.
For practical cases `git worktree` allows to have multiple checkouts. Document marks this section as "partly disputed" with an external link. IMHO git worktrees has the same ergonomics as in fossil. This section kinda discredits the rest of the article.
Also, what are they talking about with "POSIX systems", is this a really old SCM? I've been using git natively on Windows for so many years, I don't remember how many.
Either way, any new SCM needs to interoperate or easily convert git repos if it wants mass adaption. I don't think git is programmatic enough, it can get really obese really fast (even with pruning/gc), it would be great if client-side "plugins" were a thing pushed by remotes (for things like secret scanning, linting), and I do agree that something like sqlite as a back-end would suit it better for performance. I would want newer gits to really be thought as more than an SCM. People are using it to manage all kinds of state. You can run countries with the dam thing! :), and some are trying.
I've thought about distributed-ledgers using git too, with or to replace block-chains.
Fossil has some really nice ideas (although I don't like the feature bloat), but when I tried to use it I ran into so many issues and/or bugs. With git on the other hand I can't remember ever hitting a bug in decades.
I don't really like git that much, but it works pretty well most of the time.
Your alternative is... what exactly? A unique and baroque file format for each application (see: Git)? Folders of JSON or markdown files which are slow, easily corrupted, and lack indexing? Depend on some memory-heavy external DB service like Postgres?
In most cases, embedding SQLite is the best solution. And that is exactly what it was designed for.
I wish it wasn't the case, but network effects are really important. Mercurial was a better DVCS launched around the same time as git but it lost out, not because "worse is better" but the network effects spreading out from the of the linux kernel itself.
It is not just because the CLI is more intuitive, though it plays a big part.
The main reason is that mercurial is more opinionated. On a default setup, only a few commands are available, and none of them let you change the history. If you want more, you have to add an extension. These are built-in, that's just a line in a configuration file, so that's not much of an obstacle, but you have to be deliberate. It gives a natural progression, and it better defines the project organization.
With git, you have everything and the kitchen sink, literally, as it uses the "plumbing" and "porcelain" metaphor. All flavors of merge, rebase and fast forward are available, there is a git-reset command that does a dozen of different things, there is stash, the staging area, etc... The first month or two on git, I was a bit overwhelmed, none of that with Mercurial, and I already had the experience of Mercurial when I switched to git, so I was familiar with the concept of push/pull and DAGs.
Now, I tend to prefer git, though after many years, I still have trouble wrapping my head around the command line sometimes. But that's for the same reason it was so hard to me to get into it. It gives out a lot of freedom and possibilities. For example, I like the fact it is really decentralized, for example in one project the customer had a completely separate central repository we couldn't access, and they couldn't access ours, for security reasons. We worked by exchanging bundle files. At some point we also took advantage of the fact that it is possible to have more than one root commit. Also, almost all mistakes are fixable and it is hard to really lose anything (including secrets, so beware!).
For a video game analogy, Mercurial introduces you to new game mechanics as you progress, while Git makes you start in the middle of the map with all the skills unlocked.
Fossil is used for one of the most deployed embeddable database. Not sure we can call it "irrelevant".
I get what your message is saying, however words have meaning, and being hyperbolic does not help anyone when we try to bring nuances.
> Mercurial was a better DVCS [...]
Totally agree.
In other words: its use of any specific VCS is pretty much irrelevant.
There are plenty of situation in which all that matters is that the people actually building are happy with it and a tool that literally nobody else uses would be fine.
Indeed, for many engineering jobs (software and other) in some industries, it's entirely necessary to create new tools and use extremely specialiased. Good people will learn how to use (and build/improve them).
I'd possibly go as far as arguing that a sign of a good team is willingness to aggressively use the right tool for the job even if it is obscure or something they have to build themselves.
Sure, if you're hoping to get traction with an open source JavaScript library… git and github maybe be pre-requisites, but for projects of a certain sort "reach" and "adoption" by other developers are the most important metric. (Though, SQLite has done just fine with Fossil, so there's probably a degree of overstatement in the idea that it anything has to use git / be on Github.)
Git had only been around for a handful of years at the time. If not for people slowly adopting it a little at a time, thus leading to the network effect, Git would not have become the dominant VCS of the day. So yeah, when things like this, JJ, etc come along, it's worth paying attention and keeping an open mind cause any one of them might be the "everything else is irrelevant," tool in fifteen years.
I'm so old that I remember people saying that about Linux, PostgreSQL, and AMD processors ;)
I have recently returned to Fossil for personal stuff. IMO its better than git for one person projects and small teams. It was designed for a small team. What everyone else uses does not really matter for personal stuff. Nor does it matter if you are working with people willing to try something new. Nor does it matter to someone who can take a decision for a team.
It is also very easy to self host.
And you could probably get rid of like... 90% of things people complain about by just writing better frontend (and some people did that) to same backend
Programmers use different operating systems, editors, languages - is there any reason we all have to use the same source control tool? We weren’t doing so before Git came along.
Even before git, you generally had to use what your team was using, or the FOSS project you were trying to contribute to. So it's kind of a moot point.
It’s not that big of a deal with a good UI. Reality is you just use whatever the people that pay you use.
Nothing is forever (and Microsoft owns Github now, so if I were a betting man…)
Those users wouldn't mind switching to Fossil if the graphical interface is reasonably easy to discover and use.
Yeah. I was using Mercurial and, reluctanctly, had to switch to Git. Now don't get me wrong: I was forced to use both CVS and SVN in a thankfully very distant past so I love Git. But I do miss Mercurial. We switched exactly for the reason you mentioned: Git simply won the market.
Git won, Magit is awesome. Then all the Github and whatnots. It's Git, Git and Git.
And never bet against Linus, either: the world runs on Linux (and that's a good thing) and every tech company in the world uses Git. That's just how it is.
Mercurial was a tiny bit better but not that much better that it'd compensate for the entire ecosystem and people gravitating towards Git.
Maybe it is true that name is destiny after all.
Today my workflow is based on git + gerrit code review (which is heavily based around git), or in other areas github pull requests, and there is no such thing as a series of little commits that all hodge-podge together to form a particular change to the code, we tailor changes to be perfect, we push -f to keep each commit in the series to be a full and CI-tested story of a change, then we squash-merge them. My use with git is 100% all day things that were impossible with Mercurial back when I used it, if there are extensions for these things now, they are afterthoughts, git understood these concepts from the beginning.
git allows for folks to be Pinky's out with their commit history for warm an fuzzies.
If you think editing history is a grand idea that should be used regularly (like with rebase) then I already know you likely haven't been responsible for large mature code base. Where you'd rather have every comment, change and scrap of info available to understand what you're trying to maintain because the folks before you are long gone.
People will call me crazy, but you can tell Claude Code what you need with Git on your local repo and it will spit out the terminal incantations, you can also... tell it to run them after you read them.
I like the idea of having all of those within the actual VCS, mostly because with Git you need centralized services like GitHub to provide that.
But I have to ask: Is it really a good idea? Seems like feature creep motivated by the wants of a single project (SQLite).
All of those could be (albeit awkwardly) backed with a git repo and a cron job. Wiki? Just make a repo with a bunch of Markdown or this-week's-favorate-markup-language files. Ticketing & bug tracking? Again, just a Markdown file for every ticket. Embedded documentation & technical notes? Those are just special wiki pages with different attributes. Forum and chat service? Do you want your VCS to do that? I get being able to hyperlink between files and conversations, but still.
I'd love to clone a repo and be able to view all the reasoning behind commits with the context of issues too. I know the commit message should cover this but sometimes it doesn't, or its too much context, or the context is limited to the opinion of the committer. I think all that information is relevant to projects and should have some chance to live alongside it. Stuff like git-bug exists, but then you still need participation from other people.
I really love the idea of radicle.xyz which is git + p2p + issues & patches (called `COB` - collaborative objects) all in your repo but getting the buy-in of the wider population seems extremely difficult, if not impossible. I think part of the attraction here specifically is nostalgia for me, it feels like its invoking the 90s/00s where it was all a big mesh network, information wanted to be free and you couldn't stop the signal.
Fossil also seems cool but the rest of the world is tied to git and I'm tied to jj now. I guess I really wish git themselves [sic] would push something forward, I think that's the only way it would really get broad acceptance. Forges could adopt it and try and special-sauce parts but still let you push/pull "COB"s.
The plan is to 1) finish the webUI and 2) accept external auth (e.g. github OAuth). Once done, anyone can trivially host publicly their own forge and accept public contribution without any buy-in effort. Then, if user wants to go native they just install git-bug locally.
Or, from Wikipedia, "The definition of what qualifies as "feature creep" varies among end users, where what is perceived as such by some users may be considered practical functionality by others." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep
Hipp (the original SQLite author) also developed his own parser generator (Lemon) and his own editor (e). The former is also used by other projects.
Where do you store the different attributes? In the file-system? How do you manage consistency? Why put up with awkward cron solutions when you have a fully ACID database system right there to work with, which is portable across OSes, including ones which don't have cron?
If it helps any, don't think of it as a VCS but as an SCM system - one which includes version control.
Edit: Wow, it supports markdown now? and a forum? OK...
I found https://github.com/chrislloyd/git-remote-sqlite as a way to achieve git-on-sqlite, which works by registering itself as a git "remote" helper.
Amusingly there exists a "Why SQLite Does Not Use Git" article (https://sqlite.org/whynotgit.html), but there is no corresponding "Why Git Does Not Use SQLite".
For one, you probably don't want your git repo permanently corrupted if you happen to be running it over an NFS mount.
There is a lot of value in "scattered write-once files" as a storage mechanism.
And yet Fossil doesn't use SQLite for its own data model, just as a blob store with indices.
"Fossil is not Relational": https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/fossil-is-not-rela...
[1]: https://hdrz.cc/museum/bagatto-bearblog
Sharing the repo state seems impossible without going through the (somewhat painful) multi-step process to tag and push commits into git, and you lose all of the value that jujitsu actually adds (e.g. no evolog, no saved conflicts, no anonymous commits). There is no sharing solution beyond this - no way for me to work on the same working state in two locations beyond rsync the entire folder tree, which is no solution.
A SCM in 2026 that only works locally without being a clunky way of talking to git doesn't seem like a solution ready for prime-time. Maybe the google-internal-only backend systems work better.
My main other pain points were a) zero integration with pre-commit hooks and zero ideas how to do so (yes, CI does this, but it's nice to get all the auto-formatting and sanity checks without pushing, waiting, pulling new commits), and b) Automatically picking up all changes is great except when it doesn't work in which case it is _horrible_ and takes manual unpicking at best. Remembered to add something to .gitignore before doing something in the working directory? Great! Just never ever try to checkout a commit from before you added the .gitignore because now it's permanently absorbed into the repo. Also, if you every accidentally have a secret in your repo directory then that's also permanently in there, as far as I can tell there is no way to manually verify that things are purged and all the commentary on the jujitsu discussion forums were "Just avoid doing this in the first place".
I think this assertion is too vague and arguably wrong. It's unclear which traits would lead a Git alternative to be claimed as better, and even if those traits, if they exist, are relevant. It's also unclear if the tradeoffs of switching tooling away from Git are worth whatever hypothetical benefit there is to be had.
I would make the bold claim that Git is undoubtedly better than any conceivable alternative, and state that the network effect is a consequence and not a side-effect. Anyone is free to try to argue against it by pointing out concrete arguments.
For my hobby projects I have used fossil for several years. It works great and I do not miss anything from git. It's simpler and just nicer to use.
If nothing else I felt like using the same version control system for over 10 years was getting boring. Needed something new to play with. See things from a new perspective. Like playing with a new programming language now and then, even when it is something I do not expect to get much real use out of.
For practical cases `git worktree` allows to have multiple checkouts. Document marks this section as "partly disputed" with an external link. IMHO git worktrees has the same ergonomics as in fossil. This section kinda discredits the rest of the article.
pre-commit hooks?
Also, what are they talking about with "POSIX systems", is this a really old SCM? I've been using git natively on Windows for so many years, I don't remember how many.
Either way, any new SCM needs to interoperate or easily convert git repos if it wants mass adaption. I don't think git is programmatic enough, it can get really obese really fast (even with pruning/gc), it would be great if client-side "plugins" were a thing pushed by remotes (for things like secret scanning, linting), and I do agree that something like sqlite as a back-end would suit it better for performance. I would want newer gits to really be thought as more than an SCM. People are using it to manage all kinds of state. You can run countries with the dam thing! :), and some are trying.
I've thought about distributed-ledgers using git too, with or to replace block-chains.
https://deepwiki.com/drhsqlite/fossil-mirror/
I don't really like git that much, but it works pretty well most of the time.
There are Git work trees so I can make many checkouts per repository.
However for pure Code/Bin-repos....i miss Bitkeeper :-(
In most cases, embedding SQLite is the best solution. And that is exactly what it was designed for.
* Apple Mail ( "~/Library/Mail/V5/MailData/Envelope Index" )
* Legacy database in Android
* Firefox, Thunderbird
* Google Chrome, Edge
It is quick, simple, reliable and have enough performance for it's use case. Instead of using text files or develop own database formats.