Choosing a Mercurial hosting [closed]

Question

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?

Update: Kiln is also a strong contender (I use it myself) and I thought I felt I should mention the name in the question. In terms of features, the strong integration with something strong as FogBugz could be a major plus.

Mugwump

Why do you need an external repository for personal projects? Both Git and Mercurial are capable of operating as local version control systems. – Metrify

I've other friends and people who at times contribute and help resolve bugs. Plus if I want someone to get involved a hosting is always good. :) – Mugwump

I'll say this in a comment (because it doesn't directly answer the question), but I would recommend just setting up a publicly facing repository on a personal machine. The experience of doing that would likely be more valuable than using GitHub... – Metrify

I'm behind a proxy server in a university. And this is an old laptop which isn't connected to the internet always. I'm not sure if I can do that. – Mugwump

I've had a public repository on my machine for years. I've recently moved to bitbucket and I find it so much more comfortable. (I've no experience with Google Code.) – Procrustes

Looks like no one here has used both. – Mugwump

I've used both and found them each perfectly nice. The killer feature that google code lacks is privacy. Privacy plus more than two developer accounts generally means you're going to have to start paying. Google code lacks that feature completely. – Veneer

Answer 1

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.

Veneer

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? – Mugwump

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. – Veneer

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.) – Mugwump

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 :-) – Buchbinder

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. – Buchbinder

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

Kiln is free for Students and Startups. See my answer to Ashish at Kiln.SE (kiln.stackexchange.com/questions/1888/…). – Helices

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

Answer 2

JavaForge is another option to consider if you are looking for free Mercurial hosting. You can have private projects and it has all the features mentioned before. Even better, it supports Git, SVN and CVS (even mixing them within the same project) if you want to freely experiment with (D)VCS.

Copycat

Please reread stackoverflow.com/faq#promotion. I think you are doing too much promotion of your own products where it is not terribly useful. – Dendy