[Nix-dev] An interview to the fossil creator about fossil

[Evgeny Egorochkin]

On Saturday 07 August 2010 14:49:13 Michael Raskin wrote:
> On 08/07/2010 01:56 AM, Lluís Batlle i Rossell wrote:
> > On IRC #nixos we talked about fossil, so here you have an interview to
> > its creator about it:
> > http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2010/07/bsdtalk194-fossil-scm-with-d-richard.
> > html
> > 
> > He explains it comparing to other systems.
> 
> The fun thing is that he says very little about pure SCM side comparison
> (he talks more about a full-package vs SCM); and doesn't even mention
> standalone wiki-over-DVCS/bug-tracking-over-DVCS solutions.

One thing that seems to be missing is an ability to add references between 
projects, I mean if you have repo1 for project1 and repo2 for project2 that 
are related(nix, nixos, nixpkgs, hydra, disnix come to mind) you'll often have 
bug reports that refer to other bugs or commits in different projects etc. Of 
course, you can use http links but then it ceases to be distributed... the 
more and the smaller sub-projects you have, the faster it happens.

In theory of course it's a really great idea and you could use the bug/issue 
tracker to replace mailing lists as well, turning ML threads into bug 
squashing, idea discussions, patch reviews etc with better tracking(eg you can 
easily see all unanswered questions, unreviewed patch proposals etc)

To me it seems like a very good solution for small projects(just like success 
stories on the site say).

For more complex cases, and especially distributed cases, I'm pretty sure 
there will be issues like:
 - people filing bug reports against your branch/fork, which actually belong to 
the project as whole or your branch-specific bug reports spilling into the main 
project.
 - misplaced wiki edits along the same lines

Not that it can't be worked out but at least the gui to resolve this is 
missing(that's what the site says)...
-- 
Evgeny