Today I was working on a semester paper for a non-technical class. It is versioned in fossil and I have all my miscellaneous ideas, initial outline, and the paper guidelines in the Wiki. The branching also makes much more sense, and I’ve used it for major revisions of the paper or its structure.
Fossil is legitimately awesome, and I lament the fact that Git gained popularity over it.
Can anyone explain what this means and how it works?
> I tried SQLite first, but its extension API is limited and write performance with custom storage was painfully slow
For many use cases, write performance does not matter much. Other than the initial import, in many cases we don't change text that fast. But the simpler logistics of having a sqlite database, with the dual (git+SQL) access to text is huge.
That said, for the specific use case I have in mind, postgres is perfectly fine
1) Do the delta compression and caching and so on on the pgit side and lose SQL queryability (or I need to do my own), or
2) Use postgres
in which i am directly accessing b-tree layer and not consuming query layer.
for kv workloads it is much faster compare to sql.
and yeah you will get same benefits of sqlite storage engine.
I guess this could have been expected, but it didn't quite occur to me since plain git has had no issues with that repository. Either way, the import process was quite slow: the failure happened after 3h30m. I'm not sure if it would be possible to speed it up, or estimate resource consumption ahead of time and warn the user? The laptop also had gone almost 2G into swap at some point, so there was quite a bit of memory pressure as well, but I don't quite know at which point this happened.
There's a nice write up on "why" too. https://nesbitt.io/2026/02/26/git-in-postgres.html
- "Checking out" a specific branch (which can be reasonably slow)
- Query all files and folders in path `/src`
- Query all files and folders in path `/src/*` (and maybe with extra pattern matches)
- Be able to read contents of a file from a certain offset for a certain length
These are similar to file system queries to a working directory
Did you find you needed to give agents the schema produced by this or they just query it themselves from postgres?
Is there an example of the tool enabling LLM 'discovering' something non-deterministic and surprising?
2) You can do more complex analyses faster and easier (you don't need to pipe the git outputs) since it's just SQL
but pgit is not meant to replace git.
If you couple this with an optional FUSE provider, server side user branches, and gerrit like change sets, that would be awesome.
I like gerrit, but the server is such a pain to handle (java plus FS). PG would be the only server side component required, though you could have an optional review server that would act like a PG client as well.
The FUSE would be extremely nice for CI/CD for instant cloning with a local resource cache, which is much harder to do with a FS based git.
even humans don’t do this unless there’s a crazy bug causing them to search around every possible angles.
that said, this sound like a great and fun project to work on.
1) commit messages often capture the "why" something changed - versus the code/tests which focus on the what/how for right now.
2) when you have a regression being able to see the code before it was introduced and the code which was changed at the same time is very helpful in understanding the developer's intent, blindspots in their approach, etc.