Fossil

was an amazing version control system for its day in that it allowed
multiple developers to be editing the same file at the same time.

[300]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_Versions_System

Though innovative and much loved in its time, CVS was not without problems.
Among those was a lack of visibility into the project history and the
lack of integrated bug tracking.  To address these deficiencies,
the SQLite author developed the [CVSTrac][305] wrapper for CVS beginning
in [2002][310].

[305]: http://cvstrac.org/
[310]: http://cvstrac.org/fossil/timeline?a=19700101&n1=10

CVSTrac greatly improved the usability of CVS and was adopted by

Beginning around 2005, the need for a better version control system
for SQLite began to become evident.  The SQLite architect looked
around for a suitable replacement.  Monotone, Git, and Mercurial were
all considered.  But at that time, none of these supported sync
over ordinary HTTP, none could be run from an inexpensive shell
account on a leased server (this was before the widespread availability
of affordable virtual private servers), and none of them supported anything 
resembling the wiki and ticket features of CVSTrac that had been 
found to be so useful.  And so, the SQLite architect began writing
his own DVCS.

Early prototypes were done in [TCL][340].  As experiments proceeded,
however, it was found that the low-level byte manipulates needed for
things like delta compression and computing diffs

</ul>
<center><img src="fossil3.gif" align="center"></center>
</div>

<p>Fossil is a simple, high-reliability, distributed software configuration
management system with these advanced features:

  1.  <b>Project Management</b> -
      In addition to doing [./concepts.wiki | distributed version control]
      like Git and Mercurial,
      Fossil also supports [./bugtheory.wiki | bug tracking],
      [./wikitheory.wiki | wiki], [./forum.wiki | forum], [./chat.md | chat], and
      [./event.wiki | technotes].

  2.  <b>Built-in Web Interface</b> -

      [./embeddeddoc.wiki | embedded documentation] or (in the case of
      the [/uv/download.html|download] page)
      [./unvers.wiki | unversioned files].
      When you clone Fossil from one of its
      [./selfhost.wiki | self-hosting repositories],
      you get more than just source code - you get this entire website.

  3.  <b>All-in-one</b> -
      Fossil is a single self-contained, stand-alone executable.
      To install, simply download a
      [/uv/download.html | precompiled binary]
      for Linux, Mac, or Windows and put it on your $PATH.
      [./build.wiki | Easy-to-compile source code] is also available.


  4.  <b>Self-host Friendly</b> - Stand up a project website

<title>The Fossil Web Interface</title>

One of the innovative features of Fossil is its built-in web interface.
This web interface provides everything you need to run a software
development project:

  *  [./bugtheory.wiki | Ticketing and bug tracking]
  *  [./wikitheory.wiki | Wiki]
  *  [./embeddeddoc.wiki | On-line documentation]
  *  [./event.wiki | Technical notes]
  *  [./forum.wiki | Forum]
  *  [./chat.md | Chatroom]
  *  Timelines
  *  Full text search over all of the above
  *  Status information
  *  Graphs of revision and branching history
  *  File and version lists and differences
  *  Download historical versions as ZIP archives
  *  Historical change data