Fossil SCM

Raised as a usability problem by 24 people on Hacker News over 18 years (2009–2026), in 19 threads.

People raised many different problems with Fossil SCM, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 33 complaints

Can't edit a ticket description; typos require appending notes or recreating the ticket2026-09-13
Same username is separate account in each repo, so users must be re-added everywhere2026-08-17
Access control configuration is eccentric, so users may misconfigure repos unsafely2026-04-29
Renaming a commit requires manually editing through the sqlite shell2026-01-27
Hard to navigate Fossil's interface to find a file2023-08-25
Needs lighttpd installed separately, and the install steps are not straightforward2023-07-23
Setup returned constant 404 errors and the docs were wrong or unhelpful2023-07-23
Commands fail to produce a working UI; user gets a 404 page and gives up2023-07-23
Can't find a way to add files or make commits in the UI2021-01-14
Lacks git's index/staging area, which the commenter finds too hard to work without2020-09-30
Arbitrary split between CLI and web UI makes it unclear where tasks belong2020-09-30
Hard to revise commits; fixing a time-skewed commit took a day to figure out2019-05-01
Working with issues via the command line is very clunky2018-06-04
Ticket CLI is clunky: long parameters, copying UUIDs, unintuitive update commands2018-04-15
Opinionated UI forces a merge-only workflow, blocking rebasing and staging2017-12-12
Ticket IDs shown as unclickable jumble of letters instead of clickable titles2017-11-24
No UI exists for editing history, only raw sqlite database edits2017-11-22
Console commands like timeline are too simplistic, forcing reliance on the GUI2017-11-22
Poor UI makes it hard to get into compared with GitHub-style tools2017-11-22
Wiki markup is non-standard and attaching files is weird, so people must learn quirks2017-11-22
Gets slower with long history and many files; a large import ran over an hour and was abandoned2017-11-08
Wiki formatting is unusual and wiki, docs and tickets are hard to reach outside the built-in webserver2017-02-17
Couldn't get self-registration plus authenticated push working for students without lots of hand-holding2017-02-17
Must set up UI and ticketing in each repo; pushing config between repos was buggy2017-02-17
Must use commit hashes instead of version numbers, annoying with annotate/blame2017-02-17
Needs a lot of setup before it looks and feels usable2017-02-17
Fossil becomes slow to use once repository history grows large2017-02-17
Anonymous push and user registration never worked smoothly enough for a LAN with personal devices2016-10-10
Couldn't get push sync to work for workshop users on Windows and Linux2016-10-10
Gets slower as repository history grows and fails for big projects2016-10-03
Non-programmers find the Fossil web UI crappy and must learn markup to contribute2010-06-15
Renamed files aren't detected automatically, so user must manually tell it about moves2009-09-08
Default GPG signing forces typing the password on every commit2009-09-08