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Author: Solène
Date: 29 January 2023
Tags: fossil versioning nocloud
Fossil is a DVCS (decentralized version control software), an alternative to programs such as darcs, mercurial or git. It's developed by the same people doing sqlite and rely on sqlite internally.
Why not? I like diversity in software, and I'm unhappy to see Git dominating the field. Fossil is a viable alternative, with simplified workflow that work very well for my use case.
One feature I really like is the autosync, when a remote is configured, fossil will automatically push the changes to the remote, then it looks like a centralizer version control software like SVN, but for my usage it's really practical. Of course, you can disable autosync if you don't want to use this feature. I suppose this could be reproduced in git using a post-commit hook that run `git push`.
Fossil is opinionated, so you may not like it if that doesn't match your workflow, but when it does, it's a very practical software that won't get in your way.
A major and disappointing fact at first is that a fossil repository is a single file. In order to checkout the content of the repository, you will need to run `fossil open /path/to/repo.fossil` in the directory you want to extract the files.
Fossil supports multiple checkout of different branches in different directories, like git worktrees.
Because I'm used to other versionning software, I need a simple cheatsheet to learn most operations, they are easy to learn, but I prefer to note it down somewhere.
You can easily find non-versioned files using the following command:
`fossil extras`
You can get a list of tracked files that changed:
`fossil changes`
Note that it only display a list of files, not the diff that you can obtain using `fossil diff`.
By default, fossil will commit all changes in tracked files, if you want to only commit a change in a file, you must pass it as a parameter.
`fossil commit`
`fossil user new solene@t470` and `fossil user default solene@t470`
Copy the .fossil file to a remote server (I'm using ssh), and in your fossil checkout, type `fossil remote add my-remote ssh://hostname//home/solene/my-file.fossil`, and then `fossil remote my-remote`.
Note that the remote server must have the fossil binary available in `$PATH`.
`fossil ui` will open your web browser and log in as admin user, you can view the timeline, bug trackers, wiki, forum etc... Of course, you can enable/disable everything you want.
This is a two-step operation, you must first get changes from the remote fossil, and then update your local checkout:
fossil pull fossil update
Fossil doesn't allow staging and committing partial changes in a file like with `git add -p`, the official way is to stash your changes, generate a diff of the stash, edit the diff, apply it and commit. It's recommended to use a program named patchouli to select hunks in the diff file to ease the process.
The process looks like this:
fossil stash -m "tidying for making atomic commits" fossil stash diff > diff $EDITOR diff patch -p0 < diff fossil commit
Note that if you added new files, the "add" information is stashed and contained in the diff.
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