Mercurial and Bitbucket: how to structure repos

Question

I'd like to move from Subversion to Mercurial, and specificially to start hosting all my private stuff on Bitbucket. I'd like to know how adapt a large SVN repo to hg repos. I'm new to mercurial, too, but I think I understand the basics.

I've currently got a single, large SVN repo. I have over 150 projects, most of them very small, all arranged in subdirectories. There's not much more than 100mb of content including history. What I'd like to do, I think, is put them all on bitbucket as individual private repos, but then as some of them mature I'll make them public.

The only way to do that, it seems to me, is to buy the $100/month team plan -- but that's way out of my price range and I'm really looking to replace my $7/month SVN hosting plan; so it's the Pro or Amateur plans or nothing.

Am I a hopeless case, or there some way for someone with lots of small projects to use bitbucket/mercurial effectively?

Many thanks.

Answer 1

Hmmm, it's ugly, but one way might be to have one big private repo with every project in a separate named branch. That way, they're almost independent, and projects with dependencies can include others as subrepos (using branch names in .hgsub). May or may not violate the letter (arguably does the spirit :P) of the Bitbucket terms of service for accounts with limited private repos.

As for incrementally making them public, inter-project dependencies might complicate things a bit, but for the most part I think you could simply clone them to public repos.

All assuming, of course, that you can't overcome your objections to just making them all public from the get-go :)

EDIT 30/09/2010: Following Bitbucket's acquisition by Atlassian, the free plan now allows each user unlimited repositories (public and private) with nominally unlimited disk space, as long as no more than 5 users have access to his private repos.