<h1>Principles Of Operation</h1>

<p>
This page attempts to define the foundational principals upon
which Fossil is built.
</p>

<ul>
<li><p>A project consists of source files, wiki pages, and 
trouble tickets, and control files (collectively "artifacts").
All historical copies of all artifacts
are saved.  The project maintains an audit
trail.</p></li>

<li><p>A project resides in one or more repositories.  Each
repository is administered and operates independently 
of the others.</p></li>

<li><p>Each repository has both global and local state.  The
global state is common to all repositories (or at least
has the potential to be shared in common when the
repositories are fully synchronized).  The local state
for each repository is private to that repository.
The global state represents the content of the project.
The local state identifies the authorized users and
access policies for a particular repository.</p></li>

<li><p>The global state of a repository is an unordered
collection of artifacts.  Each artifact is named by 
its SHA1 hash encoded in lowercase hexadecimal.
In many contexts, the name can be
abbreviated to a unique prefix.  A five- or six-character
prefix usually suffices to uniquely identify a file.</p></li>

<li><p>Because artifacts are named by their SHA1 hash, all artifacts
are immutable.  Any change to the content of a artifact also 
changes the hash that forms the artifacts name, thus
creating a new artifact.  Both the old original version of the
artifact and the new change are preserved under different names.</p></li>

<li><p>It is theoretically possible for two artifacts with different
content to share the same hash.  But finding two such
artifacts is so incredibly difficult and unlikely that we
consider it to be an impossibility.</p></li>

<li><p>The signature of an artifact is the SHA1 hash of the 
artifact itself, exactly as it would appear in a disk file.  No prefix
or meta-information about the artifact is added before computing
the hash.  So you can
always find the SHA1 signature of a file by using the
"sha1sum" command-line utility.</p></li>

<li><p>The artifacts that comprise the global state of a repository
are the complete global state of that repository.  The SQLite
database that holds the repository contains additional information
about linkages between artifacts, but all of that added information
can be discarded and reconstructed by rescanning the content
artifacts.</p></li>

<li><p>Two repositories for the same project can synchronize
their global states simply by sharing artifacts.  The local
state of repositories is not normally synchronized or
shared.</p></li>

<li><p>Every check-in has a special file at the top-level
named "manifest" which is an index of all other files in
that check-in.  The manifest is automatically created and
maintained by the system.</p></li>

<li><p>The <a href="fileformat.wiki">file formats</a>
used by Fossil are all very simple so that with access
to the original content files, one can easily reconstruct
the content of a check-in without the need for any
special tools or software.</p></li>
