Having spent some time this week resolving problems with Subversion repository due to poor network performance I’d like to intensify my efforts towards Mercurial (Hg). In this blog post not just the application itself, but rather introduce hosting capabilities and one of the projects from it’s biosphere.
No matter how decentralized version system might be, hosting is very important part of the infrastructure. Easiest way how to share Hg repository is to publish it using HTTP protocol. This can be easily achieved through CGI script called hgweb and in detail described in the document Publishing Repositories. To give you some idea how the interface look like, the list of some well known public sites follows.
Success of a project is very often given by the quality of available solutions. Perfect example in Mercurial world is Bitbucket.org, the code hosting site with social aspects, which allows you to host up to 150 MB for free, with unlimited number of the public and maximum of one private repositories. These limits can be increased by choosing one of the available commercial plans, starting with 5 USD a month for 500 MB quota. The public repository concept is key to understand social aspects of this site, which gives you possibility to track changes in different projects and actively participate. I wouldn’t mention this project if it would be just for code hosting. Integral part of bitbucket is full featured wiki and bug tracking system, very similar to my personal favourite application – Trac. Everything packaged in snappy web interface, easy to use and exposing even advanced Mercurial functionality – like change queues.
I definitely recommended to try bitbucket.org, even if you just want to get more comfortable with Mercurial. As a new service there’s still a lot of functionality to be added, but that doesn’t detract from its qualities.
My only wish in regards to the Bitbucket might be provisioning of some background information about the company behind, future plans, and (fingers crossed) possibility to make it open source! That would ultimately establish this project as one of the fundamental companion products for every developer.
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