Which SCM to choose in this situation ? Redmine+git or Fossil or?

Question

We are a small computer science laboratory. We handle projects from very small (1 engineer) to average (10 engineers).

We need a version control tool, associated with a wiki and a bug-tracker. We have very few time and resources to spend in our system administration, but we want to have the control over it.

Until now we used Redmine with SVN and it works well, except we can't access our SVN repo from outside the laboratory for security reasons, so we would like to use a distributed version control tool to be able to keep working outside the lab.

By searching about how to set up Redmine and Git, I have heard about the Fossil project that seems to answers all our needs (sources, wiki and bug-tracker under distributed control) and seems to be easier to configure and administrate than Redmine+Git.

So I would like to have some advice from people that have administrated or used both redmine+git and fossil.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Fossil is the exact SCM for you, as described in the question. It needs close to zero administration and have all features you described you need for the work.

It has additional bonuses as well:

1. Very lightweight and need almost none of server resources (if at all - because it can work without a central server at all).

2. Extremely robust storage of the sources. Nothing can ruin the database even the power fail during the write operations.

Answer 2

The short answer is Fossil... or whatever feels good to you :-). The longer answer...

I've used both Redmine/Git and Fossil in commercial environments to manage projects internally. I'm also using Fossil exclusively to manage my student projects in the university at which I teach. Redmine, like many such products is OK, but it really is just a bit glue holding other disjoint projects together for you. Managing it is NOT difficult, but you MUST manage it as a part of your ongoing process. Fossil, on the other hand, requires virtually no management (at the server level) once you get it going. To be clearer, when I administered Redmine, we had a regularly updated repository of scripts, configuration files, and other assets we used to administer our Redmine installation (all under Redmine control, of course). When I started using Fossil, my experience guided me to create a similar project. The difference is that instead of regularly updating this project as things changed (as I had with my Redmine admin repo), I have made only 5 commits to the equivalent Fossil project over the last two years, even though I update the Fossil executable itself with greater regularity. Because Fossil is a single source/executable with all the features you mentioned integrated (not even "integrated" so much as "architecturally intimate"), my administration overhead has been effectively zero.

Also, I just LOVE using fossil from the command line in a way I never did with Git or Mercurial or Subversion (all of which are good tools). From my perspective as an engineer, Fossil's focus appears to be on the things you will do approximately 99% of the time, and many other things (reasonable things, that is) are possible without difficulty. That is a focus I greatly appreciate.

I should note I don't think Fossil is close to perfect, but it IS a great tool and has shifted my perspective on source code management, and that is a big deal to me.

Answer 3

If you guys have been using Redmine for some time, I don't really see any reason to change this. I would just stick with Redmine. Fossil is easy to setup and easy to work with, but so is Redmine. You can't access Redmine from home, can you? If you really can't access Redmine from home because of security reasons, then Fossil might be worth considering. Since I don't really know the context of your problems, I can't really say much more than recommend you to install Fossil :). It's pretty straightforward. Why don't you guys give it a try for a couple weeks and see if it works? You guys are gonna be the ones that can really evaluate whether it works well for you or not.

Sorry I can't say much more