How the Fossil DVCS solves the privacy problem of cloud based applications

If you do not know what a DVCS (Distributed Version Control System) is, just think of Git, the popular source code management system used by the Linux kernel.

But it is quite different from Git, and seems to solve a couple of problems, that always left me a bit unsatisfied when dealing with Git. In fact, it seems to give me the same nice and warm feeling I got from using the Darcs DVCS back in the days.

I will start out with a couple of issues I had when using git that I experienced recently.

1) For many developers today, when they say they are using Git, they are in fact using github.com a service that has Git in its core, but provides a number of additional services. A nice webinterface, a ticket tracker, a wiki and probably more that I am not yet aware of. However, while the product and concept is well executed, it is still a hosted solution, and while you are using it, you are dependent on an external company to provide this service.

2) I’ve been trying to replicate a similar service that github.com provides on my own machines, and experimented with software like indefero and phabricator, but those solutions leave quite a lot to be desired. InDefero for example provides both a wiki and a ticketing system, but now I have the following problems: I have to provide a MySQL Database for the wiki content, and the ticket system, that needs to be maintained, updated and backuped. Which is kind of a headache, especially considering the nice solution that Fossil is providing.

3) There are various variants of git based wikis that I’ve tried, but installing them and keeping them running is almost always a nontrivial issue.

4) Overall, using git without relying on 3rd parties to manage various aspects of the deployment, is almost impossible, or creates quite a lot of busy-work. I only quite realised that when I came across the ingenious solution that Fossil came up with.

So lets see what Fossil does that makes it so nice. It is quite simple:

Fossil stores Tickets and Wiki data within the repository. And not only that, it comes with an integrated web interface, to conveniently use this ticket system and wiki. And said web interface can be easily made available on a public website.

These choices enable a couple of convenient side effects. Whenever you have a checkout you automatically can easily use wiki and ticket system offline, and once you push to the shared repository everything is update again. Great for using it on the road without internet access. Also, makes keeping a backup of the complete project way easier.

Makes for a much more resilient and independent tool, way better suited for the lone hacker and his small crew. Hosting is trivial, you can setup a private server, or use any kind of virtual server hosting.

In fact, I like that concept so much, I am already thinking about what kind of webapps could be “unclouded” with such an approach as well. Using a distributed versioned database that keeps a complete local backup and only needs to resync periodically to the master host.

Maybe it would be possible to extract some of the Fossil infrastructure and bake it into a general web framework. Or build something similar for different kinds of webapplications.

Have fun,
Cheers
-Richard