Fossil is a

software configuration management Software configuration management (SCM), a.k.a. software change and configuration management (SCCM), is the software engineering practice of tracking and controlling changes to a software system; part of the larger cross-disciplinary field of ...

bug tracking system Tracking system or defect tracking system is a software application that keeps track of reported software bugs in software development projects. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system. Many bug tracking systems, such as those used ...

and

wiki software Wiki software (also known as a wiki engine or a wiki application) is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application ...

server for use in

software development Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

created by

D. Richard Hipp Dwayne Richard Hipp (born April 9, 1961) is an American software developer and the primary author of SQLite as well as the Fossil SCM. He also authored the Lemon parser generator, and CVSTrac; the latter became the inspiration for Trac. He was ...

Features

Fossil is a

cross-platform Within computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several Computing platform, computing platforms. Some ...

distributed version control system In software development, distributed version control (also known as distributed revision control) is a form of version control in which the complete codebase, including its full history, is mirrored on every developer's computer. Compared to centr ...

that runs on

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

derivatives,

Mac Mac or MAC may refer to: Common meanings * Mac (computer), a line of personal computers made by Apple Inc. * Mackintosh, a raincoat made of rubberized cloth * Mac, a prefix to surnames derived from Gaelic languages * McIntosh (apple), a Canadi ...

and

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

. It is capable of performing distributed version control, bug tracking,

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

services, and documentation. The software has a built-in

web interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

, which reduces

project A project is a type of assignment, typically involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a specific objective. An alternative view sees a project managerially as a sequence of events: a "set of interrelated tasks to be ...

tracking complexity and promotes

situational awareness Situational awareness or situation awareness, often abbreviated as SA is the understanding of an environment, its elements, and how it changes with respect to time or other factors. It is also defined as the perception of the elements in the envi ...

. A user may simply type "fossil ui" from within any check-out and Fossil automatically opens the user's

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

to display a page giving detailed history and status information on that project. The fossil

executable In computer science, executable code, an executable file, or an executable program, sometimes simply referred to as an executable or binary, causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instruction (computer science), in ...

may be run as a standalone

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...

server, as a CGI application, accessed via

SSH The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH Protocol) is a cryptographic network protocol for operating network services securely over an unsecured network. Its most notable applications are remote login and command-line execution. SSH was designed for Un ...

, or run interactively from the

CLI CLI may refer to: Computing * Call Level Interface, an SQL database management API * Command-line interface, of a computer program * Command-line interpreter or command language interpreter; see List of command-line interpreters * CLI (x86 instruc ...

. To simplify centralized development, Fossil provides an "autosync" mode to automatically sync changes when commits are made, in a similar manner to centralized version control systems. Content is stored using a

SQLite SQLite ( "S-Q-L-ite", "sequel-ite") is a free and open-source relational database engine written in the C programming language. It is not a standalone app; rather, it is a library that software developers embed in their apps. As such, it ...

database so that transactions are atomic even if interrupted by a power loss or system crash. Fossil is

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

released under a

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

( relicensed from previously

GPL The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first c ...

Adoption

Fossil is used for version control by the

project, which is itself a component of Fossil. SQLite transitioned to using Fossil for version control over CVS on 2009-08-12. Some examples of other projects using Fossil are: * Tcl/Tk Project * Pikchr * MySQL++, a C++ wrapper for the

MySQL MySQL () is an Open-source software, open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A rel ...

and

MariaDB MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported Fork (software development), fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Developm ...

C APIs * LuaSQLite3 * libfossil * fnc, the ncurses-based Fossil UI experience in the terminal * Androwish, the Tcl implementation for Android * ObjFW, a cross-platform

Objective-C Objective-C is a high-level general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style message passing (messaging) to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was ...

runtime and framework

Source code hosting

The following websites provide free source code hosting for Fossil repositories: * Chisel. Original site owner James Turner announced that the site would cease operation on May 1, 2013. After domain ownership was transferred on May 1, 2013, it continued operation. *

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service founded by Geoffrey B. Jeffery, Tim Perdue, and Drew Streib in November 1999. SourceForge provides a centralized software discovery platform, including an online platform for managing and hosting open-source soft ...

(unofficially through webpages hosting service)

Notes

References

External links

* {{Wiki software Bug and issue tracking software 2006 software Cross-platform free software Distributed bug tracking systems Distributed version control systems Free software programmed in C Free version control software Free wiki software Software using the BSD license Version control systems