I've been having a look through Mercurial's list of Hg hosting providers but can't really distinguish much about the real quality of the services.
What are other peoples' experiences with free services? Which would you recommend and why?
+3
A:
I'm very new to Mercurial, but the consensus seems to be that BitBucket is the place to go.
NOTE: This seems to be a consensus only for open source projects, I'm not sure about closed source projects. It seems to me like their closed-source (private repositories) offering isn't too great.
Edan Maor
2010-03-27 19:08:06
Actually, I am particularly interested in private repos, but BitBucket and ShareSource both caught my attention.
Phil.Wheeler
2010-03-27 20:42:26
What are the complaints with their private repos? I've got some personal private repos, and I've also used it with 3 different businesses, all without problems (other than a minor hiccup when they got DDOS'ed. Associate a public ssh key with your account and you're good to go.
Ted Naleid
2010-03-27 21:00:59
@Tad Naleid - My main problem is that you have a small limited number of private repos, which aren't necessarily linked to projects. From what I understand of Mercurial, every project might have multiple repos, and if I have 3 projects with 2 repos each, I've already "used up" the cheapest hosting plan. Codebase, for example, has a limited number of *active projects*, and an unlimited number of repos associated with each project, which seems much better.
Edan Maor
2010-03-27 21:43:52
@Edan: well, what would you expect? Bitbucket offers 2.5 GB of space and a private repository for free -- if you want more private repositories, then you should pay for them. That's their business model, after all :-) I think that makes a lot of sense, both for them as a provider and for me as a customer.
Martin Geisler
2010-04-01 23:53:33
@Martin Geisler - Yeah, but for me as a developer, a model where I think about "Projects", without worrying how many repos are assigned to each, is much better. I'd hate to work on a project which requires 4 repositories (for whatever reason), and then realize I have to upgrade. Obviously they're free to do whatever they want, I'm just saying that the Codebase model feels better to me :)
Edan Maor
2010-04-02 09:53:10
@Edan: ah, good point about counting "projects" instead of "repositories". I hadn't considered that. I just figured that a company would buy, say, a large plan and get 25 private repositories for $50 a month. With named branches, that would support 25 different projects quite nicely.
Martin Geisler
2010-04-02 10:06:02
+2
A:
Kiln is really nice, and the "students and startups" edition makes it free for 1 or 2 developers.
Doug McClean
2010-03-27 19:21:26
Who actually runs Kiln? I saw it was closely integrated with FogBugz and Spolsky is very vocal on the whole Hg thing...
Phil.Wheeler
2010-03-27 20:44:33
@Phil.Wheeler - Kiln is a product of Fog Creek, Joel's company. So I'm assuming it has great integration with all their other products.
Edan Maor
2010-03-27 21:39:15
I just started using Kiln and it's free for small 1 person companies like mine (even 2 people). So far, it just works. I'm happy.
kenny
2010-03-28 00:33:22
+1
A:
Google Code allows Mercurial repositories (along with SVN). Their service is very good, fast and reliable. Projects can have multiple "official" repos, and users can have personal repos of their own (but only as clones of other, public repos). They also only impose initial size limits (like 2GB for downloads), but you only need to ask to have it increased. The limits are there to prevent spam projects.
They also have a great web UI, which is something a lot of people don't care about until they've used a good one and then had to go back. A great online code review feature, a simple and easy to use wiki system, an amazing issue tracker etc.
I've used BitBucket too, and I think GC is better by a wide margin.
It's only for OSS projects though.
Lucas
2010-03-29 12:34:34
+1
A:
From my research - if you are interested in private repositories, then you are probably going to have to pay for them. Many of the services I've looked at charge based on the number of private repos but allow unlimited public repos. Having said that, some of the services are pretty cheap.
I asked a similar question back in January, but your post reminded me that I intended to update it with the research I did since. The best laid plans etc...
Anyway, I've updated it now and though my requirements were a little different (the driving force being issue tracking rather than just repository hosting) the answers there and the summary in the question, might be useful.
Mark Booth
2010-03-29 15:46:27