As of right now, on Windows 7, does Mercurial start up a server much simpler than Git?

Question

On Windows 7, from reading hginit.com, it seems like it is very easy to set up a Mercurial server?

mkdir repo
cd repo
hg init
hg serve

and that's it? Now http://localhost:8000 is the server. It seems that it is quite a bit harder to set a Git server up, either for Cygwin and mysysGit? Git for sure will make it simpler, maybe just not at this moment...

Answer 1

Having attempted to get a Git server running on Windows using gitosis, I can attest that:

"hg serve"

is vastly more straightforward!

Update

Hopefully Smart HTTP Support in Git will make this more straightforward, but of course will depend on how it is made available if we are comparing it to the ease of "hg serve".

Update 2

If all you want to do is quickly share a repo with a colleague, then "hg serve" presents a beautifully straightforward way of doing that. Setting up a robust and secure mutli-user server is another matter for both platforms.

Update 3

This is a very decent start at hosting Git repositories using IIS with Smart HTTP Support. Works for me:

http://www.jeremyskinner.co.uk/2010/06/25/hosting-a-git-server-under-iis7-on-windows/

Answer 2

Yes, running a Mercurial server is that simple. On the other hand, we (the Mercurial developers) don't really consider hg serve a tool for long-running usage. That is, it's nice to quickly share a repo at a sprint or so, but for more robust hosting, using apache + mod_wsgi or fcgi or even just cgi is probably better.

Answer 3

You can just put a bare git repo on any kind of Windows shared filesystem and use that as your server. You dont even need a running process. Security can be handled at the filesystem level.