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The Question

  • What hosted mercurial repository/bug tracking system or systems have you used?

  • Would you recommend it to others?

  • Are there serious flaws, either in the repository hosting or the bug tracking features that would make it difficult to recommend it?

  • Do you have any other experiences with it or opinions of it that you would like to share?

  • If you have used other non mercurial hosted repository/bug tracking systems, how does it compare?

(If I understand correctly, the best format for this type of community-wiki style question is one answer per option, if you have experienced if several)

Background

I have been looking into options for setting up a bug/issue tracking database and found some valuable advice in this thread and this. But then I got to thinking that a hosted solution might not only solve the problem of tracking bugs, but might also solve the problem we have accessing our mercurial source code repositories while at customer sites around the world.

Since we currently have no way to serve mercurial repositories over ssl, when I am at a customer site I have to connect my laptop via VPN to my work network and access the mercurial repositories over a samba share (even if it is just to synce twice a day). This is excruciatingly slow on high latency networks and can be impossible with some customers' firewalls. Even if we could run a TRAC or Redmine server here (thanks turnkey), I'm not sure it would be much quicker as our internet connection is over-stretched as it is.

What I would like is for developers to be able to be able to push/pull to/from a remote repository, servicing engineers to be able to pull from a remote repository and for customers (both internal and external) to be able to submit bug/issue reports.

Initial options

The two options I found were Assembla and Jira.

Looking at Assembla I thought the 'group' price looked reasonable, but after enquiring, found that each workspace could only contain a single repository. Since each of our products might have up to a dozen repositories (mostly for libraries) which need to be managed seperately for each product, I could see it getting expensive really quickly. On the plus side, it appears that 'users' are just workspace members, so you can have as many client users (people who can only submit support tickets and track their own tickets) without using up your user allocation.

Jira only charges based on the number of users, unfortunately client users also count towards this, if you want them to be able to track their tickets. If you only want clients to be able to submit untracked issues, you can let them submit anonymously, but that doesn't feel very professional to me.

More options

Looking through MercurialHosting page that @Paidhi suggested, I've added the options which appear to offer private repositories, along with another that I found with a web search.

Prices are as per their website on the day in brackets. Corrections welcome in the future.

Anyway, here is my summary, according to the information given on their websites:

  • Assembla, http://www.assembla.com/, looks to be a reasonable price, but suffers only one repository per workspace, so three projects with 6 repos each would use up most of the spaces associated with a $99/month professional account (20 spaces). Bug tracking is based on Trac. Mercurial+Trac support was announced in a blog entry in 2007, but they only list SVN and Git on their Features web page.
    • Cost: $24, $49, $99 & $249/month for 40, 40, unlimited, unlimited users and 1, 10, 20, 100 workspaces. (29th March 2010, 27th October 2010)
    • They now say unlimited repositories on all their plans too. (27th October 2010)
    • SSL based push/pull? Website HTTPS login.
  • BitBucket, http://bitbucket.org/plans/, is a dedicated mercurial hosting site for both open source and proprietary projects, with SSL support. They have an integrated bug tracker and they are cheap for private repositories. As well as it’s own issues tracker, it also integrates with Lighthouse & FogBugz.
    • Cost: $0, $10, $20, $40 & $80/month for 5, 10, 25, 50 & unlimited users, with unlimited public and pricate repositories. (27th October 2010)
    • Cost: $0, $5, $12, $50 & $100/month for 1, 5, 15, 25 & 150 private repositories. (29th March 2010)
    • Bitbucket was taken over by Atlassian (See Jira) this year, so the pricing has changed significantly. Note that 'users' are defined as people with read/write access to private repositories. (27th October 2010)
    • SSL and SSH based push/pull. No HTTPS on website login, but supports OpenID, so you can chose an OpenID provider with HTTPS login.
  • Codebase HQ, http://www.codebasehq.com/, supports Hg and is almost as cheap as BitBucket.
    • Cost: £5, £13, £21 & £40/month for 3, 15, 30 & 60 active projects, unlimited repositories, unlimited users (except 10 users at £5/month) and 0.5, 2, 4 & 10GB. (29th March 2010, 27th October 2010)
    • SSL based push/pull? Website HTTPS login?
  • Firefly, http://firefly.activestate.com/, by ActiveState looks interesting, but the website is a little light on details, such as whether you can only have one repository per project or not.
    • Cost: $9, $19, & £39/month for 1, 5 & 30 private projects, with a 0.5, 1.5 & 3 GB storage limit. (29th March 2010)
    • SSL based push/pull? Website HTTPS login.
    • The original firefly link broke and the new firefly site doesn't appear to say how much the non trial use of Firefly costs. (27th October 2010)
  • Jira, http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/, isn’t limited by the number of repositories you can have, but by ‘user’. It could work out quite expensive if we want client users to be able to track their issues, since they would need a full user account to be created for them. Also, while there is a Mercurial extension to support jira, there is no ‘Advanced integration’ for Mercurial from Atlassian Fisheye.
    • Cost: $150, $300, $400, $500, $700/month for 10, 25, 50, 100, 100+ users. (29th March 2010, 27th October 2010)
    • SSL based push/pull? Website HTTPS login.
  • Repository Hosting, http://repositoryhosting.com/, added Mercurial support in February but unlike Assembla, they did bother to update their home page to mention it.
    • Cost: $6/month, for 2GB storate, unlimited repositiries, Trac projects and users. Extra storage $1/GB. (15th October 2010, 27th October 2010)
    • SSL based push/pull? Website HTTPS login?
  • Project Kenai, http://kenai.com, appears to allow private projects but only allows 5 projects per user before they have to be requested and I can't find out if there are limits on the number of repositories associated with a project. I'm also uncomfortable about utilising resources donated by Sun to encourage open-source development for closed-source commercial projects, and there appear to be no options to pay for extra projects or resources.
    • Cost: Free, but limited to 5 projects per user. (29th March 2010)
    • SSL based push/pull? Website HTTPS login.
    • Can't find mention of private projects now (27th October 2010)
  • Kiln & FogBugz On Demand, http://fogcreek.com/Kiln/IntrotoOnDemand.html, integrates Kilns mercurial DVCS features with FogBugz, where the combined package is much cheaper than the component parts. Also, the Fogbugz integration is supposedly excellent. *8’)
    • Cost: £30/developer/month ($5/d/m more than either Kiln or FogBugz on their own). (29th March 2010, 27th October 2010)
    • SSL based push/pull?
  • SourceRepo, http://sourcerepo.com/, also supports HG and is even cheaper than BitBucket & Codebase.
    • Cost: $4, $7 & $13/month for 1, unlimited & unlimited repositories/trac/redmine instances and 500MB, 1GB & 3GB storage. (29th March 2010, 27tyh October 2010)
    • SSL based push/pull. Website HTTPS login.
Vadim Kotov
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Mark Booth
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  • I guess I must be missing something here. You say "access the mercurial repositories over a samba share." Why? The whole point of a DVCS is that you have a *local* repository which gives you near-instantaneous response. So make a local clone. Do your work. Commit your changes. And when you're done for the day/project, push or pull to your master. And if you're far from home and you have security problems, put it on a USB drive and stick it in your pocket -- no net lag at all (although you may have *jet* lag :-). – Peter Rowell Jan 16 '10 at 06:20
  • Sigh. We are already do that @Peter, but a USB stick won't get a repository half way around the world updated, and even one update a day, when that update takes half an hour to check a dozen repos over a VPNed samba share, is too much time out of the day. Hosted reposities would have the advantage that they could be accessed through customer networks (they may block VPN ports, but are unlikely to block SSL ports or https links) and being able to let customers submit bug reports directly into an issue tracking system would save us lots of time transcribing their support emails. – Mark Booth Jan 18 '10 at 11:12
  • Sorry if I misinterpreted what you said. Right now I, too, am having to deal with an *extremely* frustrating customer situation where they are trying to run a non-classified project from an office located in a SCIF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Information_Facility) and the roadblocks that the security team keeps putting up are driving me bananas! – Peter Rowell Jan 18 '10 at 23:59

4 Answers4

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Have a look at bitbucket. Mercurial hosting as well as issue tracker and wiki. If you don't need to host the stuff on your own server it might fit your requirements.

runeh
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9

It's still in development, but you may want to inquire as to whether Fog Creek's Kiln would suite your needs.

raven
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    Possibly, but with Kiln still being in beta, it's difficult to recommand it to my line manager. It's also a shame there is no indication as to cost. Fogbugz On Demand on it's own is $25/developer/month, so I guess adding Kiln support would push the price up. $5/d/m extra per month would be fine, $50/d/m extra per month less so. *8') – Mark Booth Jan 14 '10 at 18:13
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    @Mark Booth: I'm not sure we've publicly announced pricing yet, but I can tell you that FogBugz + Kiln would be much closer to the low end of your guesses than the high end. – tghw Jan 15 '10 at 00:52
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    Thanks @tghw, I was guessing that the bandwidth and storage requirements for repository hosting would be significantly higher than for issue tracking/project management, so I couldn't be sure how the the costs would pan out. I did think that since the products seem to complement each other quite nicely, the prices for them seperately would probably be more than the price of them combined. But your comment is encouraging and I look forward to seeing how the beta goes. – Mark Booth Jan 15 '10 at 11:09
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    Kiln 1.0 was officially released in early February 2010 (no longer in beta). – kamens Mar 12 '10 at 17:41
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    That's good to see, looks like the On Demand service is $25/d/m (like FogBugz) but only an extra $5/d/m over the cost of FogBugz On Demand if you have both. I also like the 'you only pay for what you use' pricing model. Shame that I can't persuade my team to buy into the FogBugz 'way'. – Mark Booth Mar 17 '10 at 04:10
  • +1 For Kiln. I'm using it and it's great. Especially for startups/small teams as it is free for <= 2 users. – Tom Chantler Apr 06 '11 at 10:23
2

Take a look at Codebase.

They can host Mercurial, Git and Subversion repositories (SSH, HTTPS). And have additional features like account management, tickets & milestones, project management, time/deployment tracking, project wikis.

Paidhi
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    The Mercurial Wiki has a list of providers offering hosting: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/MercurialHosting – Paidhi Mar 21 '10 at 08:55
1

I use Project Kenai which is backed by sun (now oracle). According to the latest communcation, the site will stay up and its infrastructure will be expanded to accept projects from java.net. It should be around for a while.

I checked and rechecked, even read the actual terms of Use and stuff and I can't find anything that prevents you from using it for a commercial purpose (needs to be double checked though). There are settings which allow you to protect your code and your mailing lists and pretty much every feature of your project. (The jira needs to be administered on its jira page It seems that you can't change the jira permission settings).

All this for free. I probably missed something as it seems too good to be true...

Jean
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  • @Jean - I'm sorry that you didn't get the bounty on this, since you were the only person to add a reply during the bounty period, but with only one up-vote it wasn't eligable for auto-accept and I was away from tha intarwebs. – Mark Booth Apr 08 '10 at 12:06
  • Don't worry about the bounty. I did hope there would be some discussion around my answer though. As I said, it seems too good to be true, but I can't find the trap... – Jean Apr 08 '10 at 13:02
  • just to clarify : https is read-only, there is an ssh access for read-write operations on the repository see here : http://kenai.com/projects/help/pages/SourceControl ) – Jean Apr 08 '10 at 13:06
  • Thanks for the clarification. It has pointed out a minus, in the form of a opersonal gripe, for Project Kenai though - horizontal scrolling on the website. I really dislike websites which think they know better than I do about how I want to use my screen real-estate. – Mark Booth Apr 12 '10 at 09:28