I recently decided I wanted to stop using GitHub for my personal programming projects. I’m not entirely sure why I decided that; there are lots of unexamined biases involved in the decision, I’m sure, and I’m not certain that it’s actually a good idea, so we’ll see where this lands me.
At any rate, I was looking, once again at Fossil and decided to give it a try. Basically, the reason I even consider moving off git is that I like having an issue tracker, and git doesn’t bundle one of those. So, if I stick with git, then I have to manage two things: a repo server and an issue server. Fossil does both, so that’s kind of interesting.
I’ve got Fossil running as a server on my Home Assistant, so all the repos that it has get rolled into the HA nightly backups. So that’s pretty good. Like, if my computer caught fire and GitHub went down, um, I guess I’d have my own Time Machine backups to restore from, but that’s a thin thread to hang from.
Anyway, I’m still in that initial phase of using a new tool, where I am figuring out how it works before I even consider personalizing it to work the way I want it to. And here’s where I run into a major problem. The default Fossil configuration comes with one issue report: “List all the issues.” The web UI lets you sort by various fields, but the way you create a new report is…you write SQL. You know, once upon a time, twenty years ago, I wrote SQL as part of my daily job. I’m not afraid of SQL. And yet, one of the things I had when I did that was…a freakin’ schema. So now I get to dig around and find that so I can write a report to “List all the issues that are not closed”.
And this is probably only going to be like 5 minutes’ work, but still. It’s annoying. And the user experience of the product is, overall, what I’d call “user hostile” if not downright “user abusive”. Do I want to fix all that? I dunno. Maybe. We’ll see. Maybe making Fossil feel more comfortable for me will be the next project I sic my coding assistant onto.
I mean – git does not have an issue tracker, but github sure does. It’s basic, but if basic is all you need…
Oh – and it will list all open issues. It does by default.
I did fuss with fossil a little, some years ago. It’s kinda neat.
I mean, I know, right? I keep coming back to GitHub. Every few years, I try something else but each “something else” is more gross or more of a pain in the neck than GH. Then, when the fact that GH is all set up to accommodate the workflow of people in an enterprise, using buzzwords and processes with which I am not even close to familiar, gets all up in my grill again, I go looking around once more. To say nothing of the connectivity requirement.
One of the interesting features that Fossil offers is that the issues (“tickets”) are part of the repo, so they get synchronized along with the code.
Another option is running gitlab locally