5.2 Fossil repositories

Setting up a Fossil repository is no different than setting up any other repository. There are certainly many advantages of using Fossil as a means of distributing packages. You can create a Linux distribution and have your website, forum, documentation, and your package repository entirely contained inside a single Fossil repository. Fossil’s built-in wiki and forum features make it the ultimate single-tool distribution software.

However, the biggest caveat of Fossil is that it doesn’t allow symlinks by default unless it’s manually set by the user, and this feature cannot even be set globally. Symbolic links aren’t quite common within distribution repositories, but they come in handy where there are two packages that use the same source files (‘emacs’ and ‘emacs-nox’, or ‘libelf’ and ‘libdw’ from elfutils). If symbolic links are too big of a deal for your repository, this can be a huge issue for you.