I saw this video few days ago which describes some of the alternative to Git and of course Fossil is one of them. I have used Fossil in some projects and found to be ok.
I found Pijul https://pijul.org/ described in this talk to be very interesting. It was discussed on HN before.
Source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4KktA_jbOE
I’ve used jj on a couple of small personal projects and it was fine, but I needed to get my head out of “git mode”. The lead developer is very helpful.
Pijul has always fascinated me. It’s like the holy grail of version control. But for my personal projects, I develop in a straight line anyway, and I’m not in control of what’s used at work, so I’ve never really used it.
Check out https://github.com/martinvonz/jj/. It's highly inspired by Pijul, among VCSes, and uses a git backing store, so you can use it personally and (mostly) seamlessly interact with any git-only team.
Pijul will be ready when it support the ability to email patches as a universal fallback method of submitting patches upstream for those that do not wish to create an account with a given service.
Isn't the patch/diff format already universal? I mean the one you generate with diff [0] and apply with patch [1]. You don't need the vcs to generate it.
There’s some metadata that is lost unless the user explicitly provides it (username/email might not be the ones sent with the email & that could be an error or for security/privacy reasons). The tool can provide a format that makes it easier to record & handle conflicts as well as streamlining the process to get it to email. You’re not wrong tho that patch/diff can be good/enough for a lot of use cases.
