Kicking the Bitbucket

[kjwcode]

One nice thing about Subversion is that it's easy to host repos yourself. One not-so-nice thing about Subversion is that it's centralised, which kind of puts a kink in the style I'd developed while using subjecting myself to Git. Someone brought up Mercurial on IRC today, and I realised I hadn't given it a fair shake, so that's what I'm doing now.

In a quick tour of the Mercurial docs I couldn't find an easy and complete way to host repos on one's own, but it turns out I'd actually signed up on Bitbucket a couple of weeks ago. It didn't take long to get a repo set up and pushed, and that owes to its large similarity to Github.

Now comes the interesting part -- trying Mercurial for a month or two to see how well it fits. Worst case, back to Subversion I go.

Comments

[kareila]

You may find the following site helpful and/or amusing:

http://hginit.com/00.html

[kjwcode]

Indeed, it is amusing. :) Fortunately I've been working with Git for the last year or so, and Mercurial isn't too different, besides the fact that it's harder to make hg destroy things. <3

[http://openid.netinertia.co.uk/jamesog]

I started using hg when we were starting OpenIndiana. It's a great tool, and I immediately loved being able to branch things off and easily merge them back in.

Git still scares me a bit :-) I wanted to switch to git purely for github, but I think I actually prefer hg. Bitbucket looks OK, but not quite as featureful as github (and the github guys insist it's just a rip-off of their work!).

Not sure what you mean by host your own repos? Surely 'hg init' is what you're after?

[kjwcode]

Yup, I can certainly see why the Github folks would be upset -- there's certainly more than a functional amount of similarity between the two.

What I mean by hosting my own repos is the equivalent of installing gitolite for Git or mod_dav_svn -- a way of setting up my own central, pushable repo with access control in a way that the docs don't caution against. :)

[http://openid.netinertia.co.uk/jamesog]

Ahh, gotcha. I just use SSH most of the time, or occasionally use 'hg serve' if I just want to do a quick clone. I set up http access to a repo in Apache just fine, although I've not set up SSL to be able to push to it.