Fossil (Software)

Fossil is a free distributed version control system (SCM ) software like Mercurial, Git, Monotone, and BitKeeper.

Properties

The name Fossil points to a main feature of the system: All modifications shall be traceable forever. Fossil does not use branches to keep track of versions, but calculated for each commit a hash key. This is necessary because there is no central repository for version management, but each user creates its own local repository. Changes by the hash key clearly identified and versioned.

Fossil consists of a single executable file that can directly act as web servers. This allows much more than a SCM: