Fossil: What People Are Saying

The following are collected quotes from various forums and blogs about Fossil, Git, and DVCSes in general. This collection is put together by the creator of Fossil, so of course there is selection bias...

On The Usability Of Git:

Git approaches the usability of iptables, which is to say, utterly unusable unless you have the manpage tattooed on you arm.
by mml at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1433387
It's simplest to think of the state of your [git] repository as a point in a high-dimensional "code-space", in which branches are represented as n-dimensional membranes, mapping the spatial loci of successive commits onto the projected manifold of each cloned repository.
by Jonathan Hartley at https://www.tartley.com/posts/a-guide-to-git-using-spatial-analogies;
Quoted here: https://lwn.net/Articles/420152/.
Git is not a Prius. Git is a Model T. Its plumbing and wiring sticks out all over the place. You have to be a mechanic to operate it successfully or you'll be stuck on the side of the road when it breaks down. And it will break down.
Nick Farina at http://nfarina.com/post/9868516270/git-is-simpler
Initial revision of "git", The information manager from hell
Linus Torvalds - 2005-04-07 22:13:13
Commit comment on the very first source-code check-in for git
I've been experimenting a lot with git at work. Damn, it's complicated. It has things to trip you up with that sane people just wouldn't ever both with including the ability to allow you to commit stuff in such a way that you can't find it again afterwards (!!!) Demented workflow complexity on acid?
* dkf really wishes he could use fossil instead

by Donal K. Fellow (dkf) on the Tcl/Tk chatroom, 2013-04-09.
[G]it is designed to forget things.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~davide/howto/git_lose.html
[I]n nearly 31 years of using a computer i have, in total, lost more data to git (while following the instructions!!!) than any other single piece of software.
Stephan Beal on the Fossil mailing list 2014-09-01.
If programmers _really_ wanted to help scientists, they'd build a version control system that was more usable than Git.
Tweet by Greg Wilson @gvwilson on 2015-02-22 17:47
Randall Munroe. http://xkcd.com/1597/

On The Usability Of Fossil:

Fossil mesmerizes me with simplicity especially after I struggled to get a bug-tracking system to work with mercurial.
rawjeev at https://stackoverflow.com/a/2100469/142454
Fossil is the best thing to happen to my development workflow this year, as I am pretty sure that using Git has resulted in the premature death of too many of my brain cells. I'm glad to be able to replace Git in every place that I possibly can with Fossil.
Joe Prostko at http://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org/msg16716.html
This is my favourite VCS. I can carry it on a USB. And it's a complete system, with it's own server, ticketing system, Wiki pages, and a very, very helpful timeline visualization. And the entire program in a single file!
thunderbong commenting on hacker news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9131619

On Git Versus Fossil

After prolonged exposure to fossil, i tend to get the jitters when I work with git...
sriku - at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16104427
Just want to say thanks for fossil making my life easier.... Also [for] not having a misanthropic command line interface.
Joshua Paine at http://www.mail-archive.com/fossil-users@lists.fossil-scm.org/msg02736.html
We use it at a large university to manage code that small teams write. The runs everywhere, ease of installation and portability is something that seems to be a good fit with the environment we have (highly ditrobuted, sometimes very restrictive firewalls, OSX/Win/Linux). We are happy with it and teaching a Msc/Phd student (read complete novice) fossil has just been a smoother ride than Git was.
viablepanic at https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bxcto/why_not_fossil_scm/c0p30b4?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
In the fossil community - and hence in fossil itself - development history is pretty much sacrosanct. The very name "fossil" was to chosen to reflect the unchanging nature of things in that history.

In git (or rather, the git community), the development history is part of the published aspect of the project, so it provides tools for rearranging that history so you can present what you "should" have done rather than what you actually did.
Mike Meyer on the Fossil mailing list, 2011-10-04
github is such a pale shadow of what fossil does.
dkf on the Tcl chatroom, 2013-12-06
[With fossil] I actually enjoy keeping track of source files again.
https://wholesomedonut.prose.sh/using-fossil-not-git