I am looking for a public Mercurial repository and would like any opinions from users of either BitBucket, freeHg, or any other alternative. I've tried the free version of BitBucket and it has a great interface, but I've experienced some inopportune downtime with their website that has me concerned. What other factors should I consider when deciding between these options?
+2
A:
From a personal point of view, I don't see the need for any features at all beyond it actually working as advertised.
- I don't need/want a web interface beyond the bare essentials
- If the website goes down for short periods once in a while it wouldn't affect how I worked at all
- If the site vanished from the face of the earth one day, I'd still have all my history in my local repos
What are your concerns?
+2
A:
Another new, free repository that uses Mercurial was just released by Sun. It's called Kenai. I've signed up for it, but haven't used it much yet so I don't feel qualified to compare it to the others, but it's another repository to consider that has a really big backer (so it's unlikely to just disappear).
Ted Naleid
2008-09-20 00:24:51
Thanks for the tip. Never heard of Kenai until now. The one big upside of BitBucket so far is that you have the option of creating private respositories. Of course it costs...
Ben Hoffstein
2008-09-20 00:39:02
Assembla did have free private repositories before (without SSL though), but they have discontinues this practice. The same may happen to BitBucket.
jetxee
2009-01-19 10:59:48
umm..yeah, so my prediction about it being a big backer so that it won't disappear? Wrong, kenai is on it's way out, oracle is shutting it down. http://blogs.sun.com/projectkenai/entry/the_future_of_kenai_com
Ted Naleid
2010-04-15 19:57:17
+4
A:
I found ShareSource to be a nice option. One factor for me is that ShareSource itself is an open source project, released under GNU Affero General Public License. In comparison, many other hosting sites are proprietary (e.g. Launchpad, GitHub, Bitbucket), and that makes me uneasy.
sanxiyn
2008-09-21 03:42:58
@sanxiyn I'm not trying to be rude, but why does it make you uneasy to use a proprietary or paid service? BitBucket isn't supposed to be where developers come to download BitBucket. It's for developers to host other projects, and it's free for open source projects.
orokusaki
2010-03-09 06:55:28
Now you can have unlimited public and private repositories and 5 private users (including you) for free
vsevolod_p
2010-10-05 18:32:09
+14
A:
Just wanted to pop in and say that we've since January been running on Amazon EC2 and the downtime from before was because we were hosted on a single dedicated server. Since then the downtime has been minimal.
jespern
2009-04-07 10:32:06
+19
A:
I'm hosting my projects on Bitbucket. What I like about Bitbucket:
- good web interface for browsing repositories
- built-in bug tracker
- built-in wiki -- backed by a Mercurial repository
- excellent support in
#bitbucketonirc.freenode.net - lots of momentum: new changesets are announced on the IRC channel as they are pushed to Bitbucket's own repository, and it seems that something is improved every day.
I've seen very little downtime, and have never lost any data.
Martin Geisler
2009-05-26 21:30:05
@Mike see the blog of bitbucket to learn for the reasons behind the (previously) frequent downtimes. This has been solved by moving to dedicated hosting.
Maxim Veksler
2010-10-10 08:41:29
Performance certainly has improved since I last commented. Especially since Atlassian aquisition.
Mike Caron
2010-10-11 15:23:23
+5
A:
For the sake of completeness, I feel I should also mention that assembla and Google Code use mercurial as well.
Jason Baker
2009-05-26 21:47:15
Assembla seems to make it impossible for everyone except site members to clone your code. Also, I don't think you can have more than one SSH key.
Joseph Turian
2009-12-11 21:31:44
+1
A:
http://mercurial.intuxication.org/ - more space and less limits than Mercurial, if you ask they'll mark your repository as private.
The downside is the bad web UI and not knowing who's behind it - who's looking at your code?
I'm currently using a private repository on Mercurial and I'm thoroughly happy. Couldn't be happier in fact.
Rui Pacheco
2010-02-01 12:06:06
A:
So far bitbucket has been great. I find it is fast and was easy to get my team setup on private repositories.
I personally feel more comfortable on a semi-proprietary or licensed system as this means the vendor has got a vested interest in my success and security.
A free service does not always have as big a motivation to stay involved in the project as their income stream is not directly linked to it's success.
Only thing I am still struggling with is Basecamp integration. And I would like to be able to directly integrate Netbeans with the issue tracker.
nuclearpengy
2010-04-16 16:24:46