@[email protected]#Fossil has way more feature than
#git, so much you need a separated forge to fill the gaps a little.
Yet, if you compare fossil and git, the former is way smaller than the latter.
So fossil is both simpler and more featureful, while still looking less "modern" because it clashes with the industrial aestetics of the day.
To me, being able to actually read and modify its source code without being overwhelmed by its complexity turns it to a convivial technology: it's not built to reduce users' and developers' degrees of freedom either through standardization or ui/ux, but to enable them to adapt it to their needs, actually increasing their degree of
#freedom.
I think the tension here is rougly the same I see between
#C (and
#hare) and
#Rust, between
#Make and
#Ninja, between
#TinyCC and
#LLVM (or
#GCC), between
#GTK2 and
#GTK4, between
#SysV and
#systemd, between
#BSD (or
#9front) and
#Linux and so on.
Due to the constraints of their age, some older tools are inheritally more suitable to build convivial technologies than other.
Corporations need to alienate their workers, to reduce their degree of freedom, to make them easy to replace. It's not just power play: it's somewhat intrinsic into the need to sell (and thus produce) standardized products that can appeal to many (and thus provide large profits) instead of creating custom solutions for the exact issue at hand that may be orginal, beautiful and tuned to the specific aestetics and goals of a specific (and maybe small) group of people... but need care, access rules and, in general, a community.
Software complexity only really serve industial (maybe militar-industrial) needs.
More often than not, against users.
Always against
#developers.
The number of browsers shrinked after
#Google launched
#Chrome and lured
#Mozilla to destroy
#Firefox credibility, because a handful of corporations control
#WHATWG (and
#W3C).
#HTML5 requires an overcomplicated
#JS engine and
#CSS got variables and
calc and so on...
And don't even get me start about systemd. Or Linux's 500+ system calls.
C sucks in many ways but there are tons of compilers. Rust looks so "safe" (and is so hyped) that people rewrite working software with it (under permissive licensings that only benefit corporate interests)
causing DoS in the wild. And nobody give a shit about the big picture that such incident shows!
But that's the fact with capitalism: it requires deep cultural homologation and submission, so that most people push in the "right" direction by themselves. They may vote differently, dress differently, care about different value but they all need to accept the basic assumptions that enable profit maximization.
Such push to complexity and homologation was lower decades ago because computers were slow and the field was still new.
Thus we got pearls like
#forth,
#Lisp,
#Pascal/
#Oberon and so on... even Linux, back in the early 2000 was a convivial technology designed more for people's (developers are still people) needs than for corporate needs.
Now Fossil is in fact modern technology, but it's built on a shitty language (with tons of implementations) that caps its complexity. And I think this is a sort of long term warranty about its usability in convivial contexts.
(sorry for the long reply... grow out of control... I guess this is something I was reasoning about since ages but never had an occasion to formulate...)
Giacomo Tesio
SMT
Artūrs
Khush
Habr
Kevin Karhan 