Hosted bug tracking system with mercurial repositories (Summary of options & request for opinions)

Question

The Question

• What hosted mercurial repository/bug tracking system or systems have you used?

• Would you recommend it to others?

• Are there serious flaws, either in the repository hosting or the bug tracking features that would make it difficult to recommend it?

• Do you have any other experiences with it or opinions of it that you would like to share?

• If you have used other non mercurial hosted repository/bug tracking systems, how does it compare?

(If I understand correctly, the best format for this type of community-wiki style question is one answer per option, if you have experienced if several)

Background

I have been looking into options for setting up a bug/issue tracking database and found some valuable advice in this thread and this. But then I got to thinking that a hosted solution might not only solve the problem of tracking bugs, but might also solve the problem we have accessing our mercurial source code repositories while at customer sites around the world.

Since we currently have no way to serve mercurial repositories over ssl, when I am at a customer site I have to connect my laptop via VPN to my work network and access the mercurial repositories over a samba share (even if it is just to synce twice a day). This is excruciatingly slow on high latency networks and can be impossible with some customers' firewalls. Even if we could run a TRAC or Redmine server here (thanks turnkey), I'm not sure it would be much quicker as our internet connection is over-stretched as it is.

What I would like is for developers to be able to be able to push/pull to/from a remote repository, servicing engineers to be able to pull from a remote repository and for customers (both internal and external) to be able to submit bug/issue reports.

Initial options

The two options I found were Assembla and Jira.

Looking at Assembla I thought the 'group' price looked reasonable, but after enquiring, found that each workspace could only contain a single repository. Since each of our products might have up to a dozen repositories (mostly for libraries) which need to be managed seperately for each product, I could see it getting expensive really quickly. On the plus side, it appears that 'users' are just workspace members, so you can have as many client users (people who can only submit support tickets and track their own tickets) without using up your user allocation.

Jira only charges based on the number of users, unfortunately client users also count towards this, if you want them to be able to track their tickets. If you only want clients to be able to submit untracked issues, you can let them submit anonymously, but that doesn't feel very professional to me.

More options

Looking through MercurialHosting page that @Paidhi suggested, I've added the options which appear to offer private repositories, along with another that I found with a web search.

Prices are as per their website on the day in brackets. Corrections welcome in the future.

Anyway, here is my summary, according to the information given on their websites:

• Assembla, http://www.assembla.com/, looks to be a reasonable price, but suffers only one repository per workspace, so three projects with 6 repos each would use up most of the spaces associated with a $99/month professional account (20 spaces). Bug tracking is based on Trac. Mercurial+Trac support was announced in a blog entry in 2007, but they only list SVN and Git on their Features web page.
  • Cost: $24, $49, $99 & $249/month for 40, 40, unlimited, unlimited users and 1, 10, 20, 100 workspaces. (29th March 2010, 27th October 2010)
  • They now say unlimited repositories on all their plans too. (27th October 2010)
  • SSL based push/pull? Website HTTPS login.
• BitBucket, http://bitbucket.org/plans/, is a dedicated mercurial hosting site for both open source and proprietary projects, with SSL support. They have an integrated bug tracker and they are cheap for private repositories. As well as it’s own issues tracker, it also integrates with Lighthouse & FogBugz.
  • Cost: $0, $10, $20, $40 & $80/month for 5, 10, 25, 50 & unlimited users, with unlimited public and pricate repositories. (27th October 2010)
  • Cost: $0, $5, $12, $50 & $100/month for 1, 5, 15, 25 & 150 private repositories. (29th March 2010)
  • Bitbucket was taken over by Atlassian (See Jira) this year, so the pricing has changed significantly. Note that 'users' are defined as people with read/write access to private repositories. (27th October 2010)
  • SSL and SSH based push/pull. No HTTPS on website login, but supports OpenID, so you can chose an OpenID provider with HTTPS login.
• Codebase HQ, http://www.codebasehq.com/, supports Hg and is almost as cheap as BitBucket.
  • Cost: £5, £13, £21 & £40/month for 3, 15, 30 & 60 active projects, unlimited repositories, unlimited users (except 10 users at £5/month) and 0.5, 2, 4 & 10GB. (29th March 2010, 27th October 2010)
  • SSL based push/pull? Website HTTPS login?
• Firefly, http://firefly.activestate.com/, by ActiveState looks interesting, but the website is a little light on details, such as whether you can only have one repository per project or not.
  • Cost: $9, $19, & £39/month for 1, 5 & 30 private projects, with a 0.5, 1.5 & 3 GB storage limit. (29th March 2010)
  • SSL based push/pull? Website HTTPS login.
  • The original firefly link broke and the new firefly site doesn't appear to say how much the non trial use of Firefly costs. (27th October 2010)
• Jira, http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/, isn’t limited by the number of repositories you can have, but by ‘user’. It could work out quite expensive if we want client users to be able to track their issues, since they would need a full user account to be created for them. Also, while there is a Mercurial extension to support jira, there is no ‘Advanced integration’ for Mercurial from Atlassian Fisheye.
  • Cost: $150, $300, $400, $500, $700/month for 10, 25, 50, 100, 100+ users. (29th March 2010, 27th October 2010)
  • SSL based push/pull? Website HTTPS login.
• Repository Hosting, http://repositoryhosting.com/, added Mercurial support in February but unlike Assembla, they did bother to update their home page to mention it.
  • Cost: $6/month, for 2GB storate, unlimited repositiries, Trac projects and users. Extra storage $1/GB. (15th October 2010, 27th October 2010)
  • SSL based push/pull? Website HTTPS login?
• Project Kenai, http://kenai.com, appears to allow private projects but only allows 5 projects per user before they have to be requested and I can't find out if there are limits on the number of repositories associated with a project. I'm also uncomfortable about utilising resources donated by Sun to encourage open-source development for closed-source commercial projects, and there appear to be no options to pay for extra projects or resources.
  • Cost: Free, but limited to 5 projects per user. (29th March 2010)
  • SSL based push/pull? Website HTTPS login.
  • Can't find mention of private projects now (27th October 2010)
• Kiln & FogBugz On Demand, http://fogcreek.com/Kiln/IntrotoOnDemand.html, integrates Kilns mercurial DVCS features with FogBugz, where the combined package is much cheaper than the component parts. Also, the Fogbugz integration is supposedly excellent. *8’)
  • Cost: £30/developer/month ($5/d/m more than either Kiln or FogBugz on their own). (29th March 2010, 27th October 2010)
  • SSL based push/pull?
• SourceRepo, http://sourcerepo.com/, also supports HG and is even cheaper than BitBucket & Codebase.
  • Cost: $4, $7 & $13/month for 1, unlimited & unlimited repositories/trac/redmine instances and 500MB, 1GB & 3GB storage. (29th March 2010, 27tyh October 2010)
  • SSL based push/pull. Website HTTPS login.

Answer 1

It's still in development, but you may want to inquire as to whether Fog Creek's Kiln would suite your needs.

Answer 2

Have a look at bitbucket. Mercurial hosting as well as issue tracker and wiki. If you don't need to host the stuff on your own server it might fit your requirements.

Answer 3

Take a look at Codebase.

They can host Mercurial, Git and Subversion repositories (SSH, HTTPS). And have additional features like account management, tickets & milestones, project management, time/deployment tracking, project wikis.

Answer 4

I use Project Kenai which is backed by sun (now oracle). According to the latest communcation, the site will stay up and its infrastructure will be expanded to accept projects from java.net. It should be around for a while.

I checked and rechecked, even read the actual terms of Use and stuff and I can't find anything that prevents you from using it for a commercial purpose (needs to be double checked though). There are settings which allow you to protect your code and your mailing lists and pretty much every feature of your project. (The jira needs to be administered on its jira page It seems that you can't change the jira permission settings).

All this for free. I probably missed something as it seems too good to be true...

Answer 5

I am looking for a good hosted tracking system. Codebasehq has a feature that you can add user with restricted grants. like only read/write issues tickets. I think this is very good and all others ( at least that I have looked at ) doesn't have this option.

I am testing BitBucked ( it is good, but all users have access to the ticket and the source code as well, and I want my customers have access to the ticket but they can't see my code), Fogbugz, it seems the best, but there are a lot of features that I don't need and it will be very expensive to a small company.