Fossil

    <td>Select contributors</td></tr>
<tr><td>Focus on individual branches</td>
    <td>Focus on the entire tree of changes</td></tr>
<tr><td>One check-out per repository</td>
    <td>Many check-outs per repository</td></tr>
<tr><td>Remembers what you should have done</td>
    <td>Remembers what you actually did</td></tr>
<tr><td>Commit first</td>
    <td>Test first</td></tr>
<tr><td>SHA-2</td>
    <td>SHA-3</td></tr>
</table></blockquote>

<h3 id="features">2.1 Featureful</h3>

Git provides file versioning services only, whereas Fossil adds

One commentator characterized Git as recording history according to
the victors, whereas Fossil records history as it actually happened.

We go into more detail on this topic in a separate article,
[./rebaseharm.md | Rebase Considered Harmful].


<h3 id="testing">2.8 Test Before Commit</h3>

One of the things that falls out of Git's default separation of commit
from push is that there are several Git sub-commands that jump straight
to the commit step before a change could possibly be tested. Fossil, by
contrast, makes the equivalent change to the local working check-out
only, requiring a separate check-in step to commit the change. This
design difference falls naturally out of Fossil's default-enabled
autosync feature.

The prime example in Git is rebasing: the change happens to the local
repository immediately if successful, even though you haven't tested the
change yet. It's possible to argue for such a design in a tool like Git
which doesn't automatically push the change up to its parent, because
you can still test the change before pushing local changes to the parent
repo, but in the meantime you've made a durable change to your local Git
repository's blockchain. You must do something drastic like <tt>git
reset --hard</tt> to revert that rebase if it causes a problem. If you
push your rebased local repo up to the parent without testing first,
you've now committed the error on a public branch, effectively a
violation of
[https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/merging-vs-rebasing#the-golden-rule-of-rebasing
| the golden rule of rebasing].

Lesser examples are the Git <tt>merge</tt>, <tt>cherry-pick</tt>, and
<tt>revert</tt> commands, all of which apply work from one branch onto
another, and all of which do their work immediately without giving you
an opportunity to test the change first locally unless you give the
<tt>--no-commit</tt> option.

Fossil cannot sensibly work that way because of its default-enabled
autosync feature. Instead of jumping straight to the commit step, Fossil
applies the proposed merge to the local working directory only,
requiring a separate check-in step before the change is committed to the
repository blockchain. This gives you a chance to test the change,
whether manually, or by running your software's automatic tests, or
both.

Another difference is that because Fossil requires an explicit commit
for a merge, it makes you give an explicit commit <i>message</i> for
each merge, whereas Git writes that commit message itself by default
unless you give the optional <tt>--edit</tt> flag to override it.

We don't look at this difference as a workaround in Fossil for autosync,
but instead as a test-first philosophical difference. When every commit
is pushed to the parent repo by default, it encourages a working style
in which every commit is tested first. We think this is an inherently
good thing.

Incidentally, this is a good example of Git's messy command design.
These three commands:

<pre>
    $ git merge HASH 
    $ git cherry-pick HASH 
    $ git revert HASH
</pre>

...are all the same command in Fossil:

<pre>
    $ fossil merge HASH
    $ fossil merge --cherrypick HASH
    $ fossil merge --backout HASH
</pre>

If you think about it, they're all the same function: apply work done on
one branch to another. All that changes between these commands is how
much work gets applied — just one check-in or a whole branch — and the
merge direction.  This is the sort of thing we mean when we point out
that Fossil's command interface is simpler than Git's: there are fewer
concepts to keep track of in your mental model of Fossil's internal
operation.

Fossil's implementation of the feature is also simpler to describe. The
online help for <tt> [/help?cmd=merge | fossil merge]</tt> is currently
41 lines long, whereas the aggregate man page length for the above three
Git commands is over 1000 lines, much of it mutually redundant. (e.g.
the <tt>--edit</tt> and <tt>--no-commit</tt> options get described three
different times, each time differently.)


<h3 id="hash">2.9 Hash Algorithm: SHA-3 vs SHA-2 vs SHA-1</h3>

Fossil started out using 160-bit SHA-1 hashes to identify check-ins,
just as in Git. That changed in early 2017 when news of the
[https://shattered.io/|SHAttered attack] broke, demonstrating that SHA-1
collisions were now practical to create. Two weeks later, the creator of
Fossil delivered a new release allowing a clean migration to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-3|256-bit SHA-3] with