// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
From Git to Fossil
People at Git has started to work on a proposal to make the Rust1
programming language mandatory. I don't like Rust and, above all,
I don't like its community of little extremist characters who are
trying to make everyone swallow their crap by rewriting projects that
have been working for decades, doing social media brigading, and other
nice little gems worthy of any tiny group with totalitarian delusions.
That's why when I see that a project aims to "force" the use of or the
switch from C to Rust, to the extent of my possibilities, I flee
from it as if I were pursued by the Balrog of the Lord of the Rings
with his whip.
I'm old enough to have used (or tested) many version control systems:
RCS (Revision Control System), CVS (Concurrent Version System),
SVN (Subversion), HG (Mercurial), BZR (Bazaar), and the aforementioned
Git, which means I have no problem in switching again, so I started to
think about a Git substitute for my personal projects.
The options were to go back to one of the already known or look at
something else, and I remembered Fossil. I started looking over the
source code and reading the official documentation2 to learn its
features, its dependencies, how to install and configure it, etc., and
I noticed it had many things I like:
Taking all this into account, I decided to install Fossil and switch my
projects from Git. Below you'll see how to do it.
The first step is to install Fossil and it's quite likely that the
package manager of your operating system already has it available:
Once your package manager ends the installation you can check its
availability with the following command:
The command above should return something like the following:
Fossil's documentation4 has the following example to export a Git
repository and import it as a Fossil repository:
I did it differently because I wanted to adjust some things to have
the imported repositories "right". As I have several repositories I
created two different folders, one, git-exported, to store the exported
repositories and another one, fossils, to store the new Fossil repositories:
Now you can get into each Git repository folder and export it: