Why I Use Fossil
While I love the <i>idea</i> of Fossil, I think Zed downplays a lot of the problems that it has in reality.<p>There's no real way to throw out branches easily, nor is there any rebasing.  Fossil doesn't track renames, so if you rename files in a branch, you'll need to rename them again on mainline before the merge.  Fossil doesn't have any concept of patch management via email, which is fairly central to most OSS projects I'm involved with.  The bug tracker is not DAG-based, but rather last-wins, which can result in some surprising outcomes. You have to log in to see bug reports, which can be discouraging for users, and prevents your bugs from being googleable.  And so on.<p>I'm not saying that GitHub is perfect--hell, I make a competitor, based on Mercurial no less, so I clearly don't think it is--but I think Fossil still has enough fundamental flaws in it that I would be very hesitant to pick it up for a new project. I'd rather deal with GitHub's proprietary system (of which all data is accessible via its API [1]) than deal with Fossil's SCM quirks.  Zed clearly disagrees, and has projects where it's working for him, and the SQLite project uses it, so it might work for you. But I would strongly encourage caution. I'll personally be sticking to Mercurial and Git for now.<p>[1]: <a href="http://develop.github.com/" rel="nofollow">http://develop.github.com/</a>