Choosing a Mercurial hosting.

views:

204

answers:

+3 Q:

Choosing a Mercurial hosting.

I'm looking for a Mercurial hosting which is free. (I'm only a student right now.) And it seems like it boils down to Bitbucket or Project Hosting on Google Code. (Other suggestions are welcome.)

So, how do these services compare in terms of features and service?

This question does not ask for a subjective opinion, just a feature-set and service comparison. Facts basically.

+4 A:

Your choice basically comes down to whether you want it to be private or not.

If you want it open to the world you can't go wrong with either.

However, if you want it to be private you should go with bitbucket. Even then you are limited to 2 users in a free private repo.

My guess is you want it to be private and free (since you're a student) so your only other option there is to host it yourself. This would be a great option if you can pull it off. Remember, you don't need to have it hosted on a server to share and merge, there are plenty of commands for sharing patch sets through email.

Kiln http://www.fogcreek.com/Kiln/StudentAndStartup.html is another option you can get for free since you are student. Run by Joel Spolsky's company I believe.

jwsample 2010-08-15 19:18:42

I've been doing just that - hosting myself. But at times people want to just see code (recruiters possibly) without pulling. I did know about Kiln but did not know that they had a version for students. So Bitbucket and Google, both offer pretty much the same thing?

Ashish 2010-08-15 19:25:53

Pretty much. Source control + wiki + bug tracking. I don't think the last two features sound very important to you since this sounds like its for personal stuff. The implementation details differ for sure. For example, google code's wiki is implemented on top of subversion while bitbucket's is implemented on top of mercurial. The biggest difference is whether you have the option of making your projects private. You won't be able to with google code but you will with for profit hosts.

jwsample 2010-08-15 19:36:21

Hmm... I see. That is interesting. I signed up for Kiln to check it out and turns out it is a 45 days trial. And I'm not gonna be using it for at least 3 weeks from now. Bummer. (I am hoping they'll "pause" it for me.)

Ashish 2010-08-15 20:07:10

jwsample: the Mercurial support in Google Code is not built on top of Subversion but on top of their BigTable database. They replaced the storage backend of Mercurial to do that. Ask durin42 in #mercurial on irc.freenode.net for details :-)

Martin Geisler 2010-08-15 22:50:31

You can have 1 private repository with a free Bitbucket account. A private repository is simply a repository that is not readable by everybody. There can be an unlimited number of readers and writers to such a repository -- it is thus perfectly possible for 10 guys to collaborate on a secret (private) project on Bitbucket. Each collaborator should just create his own account and the guy who owns the private repository adds the others are writers/readers.

Martin Geisler 2010-08-15 22:53:30

I stand corrected.

jwsample 2010-08-15 23:03:15

jwsample: no problem, I like your answer still :-)

Martin Geisler 2010-08-16 07:49:28

Kiln is free for Students and Startups. See my answer to Ashish at Kiln.SE (http://kiln.stackexchange.com/questions/1888/can-you-pause-my-trial-period).

tghw 2010-08-16 11:51:33

Update: Since bitBucket was acquired by Atlassian, they've boosted their free account to 5 users and unlimited private and public repos.

Matt Miller 2010-10-19 21:30:39

ansaurus

tags:

views:

answers:

Choosing a Mercurial hosting.

related questions