Fossil

<li> [#ctrl | Control Artifacts] </li>
<li> [#wikichng | Wiki Pages] </li>
<li> [#tktchng | Ticket Changes] </li>
<li> [#attachment | Attachments] </li>
<li> [#event | Events] </li>
</ul>

These seven artifact types are described in the sequel.

In the current implementation (as of 2009-01-25) the artifacts that
make up a fossil repository are stored in in as delta- and zlib-compressed
blobs in an <a href="http://www.sqlite.org/">SQLite</a> database.  This
is an implementation detail and might change in a future release.  For
the purpose of this article "file format" means the format of the artifacts,
not how the artifacts are stored on disk.  It is the artifact format that
is intended to be enduring.  The specifics of how artifacts are stored on
disk, though stable, is not intended to live as long as the
artifact format.

All of the artifacts can be extracted from a Fossil repository using
the "fossil deconstruct" command.

<a name="manifest"></a>
<h2>1.0 The Manifest</h2>

A manifest defines a check-in or version of the project
source tree.  The manifest contains a list of artifacts for
each file in the project and the corresponding filenames, as

symbolic name when the check-in is intended to start a new branch.

Each manifest has a single U-card.  The argument to the U-card is
the login of the user who created the manifest.  The login name
is encoded using the same character escapes as is used for the
check-in comment argument to the C-card.

A manifest has an optional Z-card as its last line.  The argument
to the Z-card is a 32-character lowercase hexadecimal MD5 hash
of all prior lines of the manifest up to and including the newline 
character that immediately precedes the "Z".  The Z-card is just
a sanity check to prove that the manifest is well-formed and
consistent.

A sample manifest from Fossil itself can be seen

The W card is used to specify the text of the wiki page.  The
argument to the W card is an integer which is the number of bytes
of text in the wiki page.  That text follows the newline character
that terminates the W card.  The wiki text is always followed by one
extra newline.

An example wiki artifact can be seen
[/artifact?name=7b2f5fd0e0&txt=1 | here].

<a name="tktchng"></a>
<h2>5.0 Ticket Changes</h2>

A ticket-change artifact represents a change to a trouble ticket.
The following cards are allowed on a ticket change artifact:

An example ticket-change artifact can be seen
[/artifact/91f1ec6af053 | here].

<a name="attachment"></a>
<h2>6.0 Attachments</h2>

An attachment artifact associates some other artifact that is the
attachment (the source artifact) with a ticket or wiki page or event to which
the attachment is connected (the target artifact).
The following cards are allowed on an attachment artifact:

<blockquote>
<b>A</b> <i>filename target</i> ?<i>source</i>?<br />
<b>C</b> <i>comment</i><br />
<b>D</b> <i>time-and-date-stamp</i><br />
<b>U</b> <i>user-name</i><br />
<b>Z</b> <i>checksum</i>
</blockquote>

The A card specifies a filename for the attachment in its first argument.
The second argument to the A card is the name

which the current event is an edit.  The P card is a hint to the system
that it might be space efficient to store one event as a delta of the
other.

An event might contain one or more T-cards used to set
[./branching.wiki#tags | tags or properties]
on the event.  The format of the T-card is the same as
described in [#ctrl | Control Artifacts] section above, except that the
second argument is the single characcter "<b>*</b>" instead of an
artifact ID and the name is always prefaced by "<b>+</b>".
The <b>*</b> in place of the artifact ID indicates that
the tag or property applies to the current artifact.  It is not
possible to encode the current artifact ID as part of an artifact,
since the act of inserting the artifact ID would change the artifact ID,
hence a <b>*</b> is used to represent "self".  The "<b>+</b>" on the
name means that tags can only be add and they can only be non-propagating
tags.  A an event, T cards are normally used to set the background
display color for timelines.

The optional U card gives name of the user who entered the event.

A single W card provides wiki text for the document associated with the
event.  The format of the W card is exactly the same as for a 
[#wikichng | wiki artifact].

The Z card is the usual checksum over the rest of the attachment artifact.


<a name="summary"></a>
<h2>8.0 Card Summary</h2>