Fossil Repos¶
Why the change ?¶
Over the years, I have realised that my “mecrisp-unofficial-userdoc” has a number of limitations, namely:
- Increasingly unmanageable: there are growing numbers of broken links and unfinished pages, it's harder to retain the entire picture.
- Single point of failure: If Sourceforge dissapear for whatever reason, all this knowledge is lost.
- Being HTML based using the Sphinx document system makes creation easy for me, but for the reader saving individual articles is almost impossible, and very impractical.
- The Knowledge Is One Way: You can read my contributions, but valuable reader contributions aren't possible.
The New System ?¶
The main body of this website, the HTML part was initally designed to pass on Forth knowledge as I learnt it myself as a rank beginner starting in 2014.
Nowdays, I’ve moved from creating learning Forth (Mecrisp-Stellaris) documentation to real world project articles and these require :
- A Distributed Code Versioning System (DCVS) so that anyone can contribute code improvements.
- A Wiki with links that support the code with documentation
- Flowcharts: Native flowcharts are often needed to explain complex processes
- Inbuilt Web Server: to make project management and documentation creation easy.
- Menues: that can be tailored for each project
- Reader Contributions: readers need a simple way to own the documentation, and if desired contribute their own work back to me for possible inclusion.
- Easy Project Sharing: Each Project should be easy to share by email or a website as it is just a single compressed file. Being distributed will make the knowledge much more robust and more difficult to lose.
- Multi Operating System Usage: This will work on all OS's including Unix, Mac and Windows as is. All you need to do is install the Free FLOSS Fossil DVCS. See https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
But Why Not use GIT ?¶
Git is only a DVCS, it lacks a Wiki with document links, Forum, Flowcharts, Trouble Tickets, Pictures and a Web Server. GIT is a large collection of files, unlike Fossil which is only ONE file.
Fossil has a inbuilt WEBSERVER so you can use any browser on any OS, to view all the content, from pictures to flowcharts, code to repository, nothing extra is needed, it’s all self-contained and easy to use.
Only Fossil DVCS is suitable as a complete distributed knowledge system.
Ok, you have decided to check out Fossil DVCS !¶
First go to the Fossil Homepage and read how to install it on your OS.
How to download one of my new projects here
1. Now Fossil is installed, select and download a Project Repo from my website.
2. Install the Repo
1. Create a folder/directory called 'Fossil'
2. Save the Repo you downloaded into this directory. This will be the place that all Fossil Repos are saved in future.
3. Create a sub-folder in this directory with the same name as the repo (ie if the repo is named "furs.fossil" then name the directory "furs")
4. CD to the new sub-folder and run this command "fossil open ../reponame.fossil" (in the examle above it would be "fossil open ../furs.fossil")
5. You should see all the contents of the Repo being loaded into the sub-folder ready to use
6. Done
