Moving from RTC to fossil

By David
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First published 14th December 2015 (Last Modified 9th January 2021)

I am a fan of IBM's Rational Team Concert, but have reluctantly decided that I need to move from it to something much easier on the operations side. My specific problem is that the Ubuntu machine on which I run the RTC server needs a clean reinstall1. Having tried (on my laptop that also has Ubuntu installed) to use my backup of the repository2 to get a working clone of the RTC system has proved a LOT harder that I would like, I ended investigating alternatives.

Fossil is my selected alternative, at least for the time being. The pro's and con's (at least as compared with RTC) are:

Pro's

  • Install is easy (I'd go as far as trivial) - fossil is a single executable (with executables for Windows and Linux (also Mac, though I don't have any of those at this time))
  • Includes a problem tracking system as well as a source control system (also a wiki)
  • The repository is a single file, yet is still a SQL database (fossil uses SQLite)
  • Its mental model for development is not that dissimilar to RTC
  • Builtin web server for admin and browse capabilities (OK, so you have to run the executable to get the server running...)
  • Moving from RTC will allow me to use an up to date eclipse - not that the current version I'm using is broken!

Con's

  • No integration with eclipse - this one is a shame, but my website and plugins are small enough that I can handle running a commit command to put my changes into the repository
  • No included build support (though fossil can generate a rss feed). I did investigate getting jenkins running, but since there's just me and I already had one-step build running, I've (for the time being at least) decided I can manage to run a manual build instead
  • The lack of build support means there's no immediately obvious way to publish build results - this is next on my investigation list (I suspect using either a wiki page, or technotes might be a substitute, but I'm worried about wanting attachments in some form - I guess that's another con for the moment.

As you can probably guess I do consider this to be a shame, but I don't want to spend lots of time attempting to set up RTC on a reinstalled machine so that it's the same as before

Footnotes

  1. Somehow my kernel and the /boot are not in sync (I think the /boot partition that's being mounted is NOT the one that grub is using at boot time, and since I'm also having to manually select the upstart kernel (the standard kernel locks up in the G15 keyboard handler that I installed) AND the size of the /boot partition is tiny I need to do a reinstall to get to a clean system
  2. OK, I admit it, I didn't prove that I had a backup by attempting the restore on a different machine earlier