[Cheatsheet] Fossil version control software

Author: Solène
Date: 29 January 2023
Tags: fossil versioning nocloud

Introduction

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.

=>Fossil official website

Why?

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.

Fossil repository is a file

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.

Cheatsheet

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.

View extra files

You can easily find non-versioned files using the following command:

`fossil extras`

View changes

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`.

Commit

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`

Change author name

`fossil user new solene@t470` and `fossil user default solene@t470`

=>More possibilities are explained in Fossil documentation

Add a remote

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`.

Display the Web Interface

`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.

Get changes from a remote

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

Commit partial changes in a file

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.

=>Fossil documentation: Git to Fossil translation

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.