2025-08-13

~300 words lastmod

I’m just saying. If GitHub is dead to you too, maybe it’s time to try not just a different host, but a different SCM.

I’m partial to Fossil, since it bundles most of the flair we associate with projects (SCM, wiki, issue tracker, notes, chat) in a single executable. I have shared Fossil projects via CGI.

https://fossil-scm.org/

Chisel provides free Fossil project hosting. No it’s not GitHub, but maybe that’s not what we need.

https://chiselapp.com

Mercurial is still chugging along. I always preferred it to Git, though no lie Git has Katamari’d its way to having most of the affordances that made early Mercurial a more pleasant experience.

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/

Numerous free and paid project hosts support Mercurial.

https://wiki.mercurial-scm.org/MercurialHosting

I mainly used Jujutsu’s Git wrapper. I don’t mind wrappers. SVK was my intro to distributed version control. Wrappers are a great way to look at problems from a new angle.

https://jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/git-comparison/

So far from my fiddling, Jujutsu as wrapper works with anything that can host a Git repo.

darcs

uh

is a thing that exists

I have never tried using Darcs. But hey maybe a “theory of patches” is just the thing for you!

https://darcs.net

That’s all I got for distributed version control, though I’m sure that’s not all there is. Just the highest profile stuff.

And you could always just build your own Git.

From a somewhat improvised Mastodon thread.

https://masto.hackers.town/@randomgeek/115025104070658712