Soon we will start with an open source project (py + qt), which should be multi-platform (we use FreeBSD as a native platform), and we are not sure which DVCS / hosting to use.
In the past, we used darcs for a long time, but moved away from it due to the lack of suitable public hosting. Played for some time with Monotone - beautifully designed, but mostly a niche today. Fossil is good, but it uses a non-standard wiki, and its tracker works, but we expect more.
Given that we will not work on a kernel-sized project, we do not consider Git, which we consider too complicated to solve this problem, especially for potential participants who can use Windows and prefer the GUI tools.
So the story comes to Bazaar / Launchpad and Mercurial / Bitbucket ...
Here are some pros / cons we put together, but would love to hear if we missed something that might help us solve ...
Bazaar pro / cons:
- 2.4 is probably fast enough for our needs,
- easy to use
- has a good GUI tool (explorer),
- handles empty directories
- (probably) less popular than Mercurial,
- has no equivalent hg branches named
The last point is probably not important, because there are nicks, and there is a colo-branches plugin, so you can get the same / similar functionality.
The most problematic quirk we find in Bazaar is its revision scheme and the problem that can arise if you push from the branch of the trait to the top, which will change the revids.
Maybe this is a lesser problem when using Launchpad ...
How far from Launchpad: - it has a very good error tracker with an email interface - it is (probably) more project-oriented than Bitbucket - there are no private repositories, as with Bitbucket - there is no wiki for projects - error ( https: // bugs. launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/240067 ) is over 3 years old and still has a "Low priority". LP is the only one among {LP, Sourceforge, Bitbucket, Google, Github} that lacks this feature, and it really sucks and degrades, otherwise it’s a good hosting solution.
What we found in another camp ...
Mercurial:
- (probably) more popular than Bazaar,
- quick,
- easy to use
- there is a good TortoiseHG for users without much attention,
- we like the named branches
- some quirks like handling empty directories (or https://www.mercurial-scm.org/bts/issue29 )
However, what we like most about Bazaar is, we believe, great merge options without problems with modified versions due to the revno: hash scheme.
Regarding Bitbucket:
- we like to have unlimited / private repositories
- we like to have wikis for project (s)
- we will skip the email interface for the tracker, and the tracker (possibly) is not on par with the file on the LP (reviews, etc.).
In the end, let's say there are some projects that interest us that are under Git @github, so we would like to use one DVCS that can help us interact with git @github projects.
We find that the bzr-git plugin is very capable and has no experience with hg-git.
Although there is a bzr-hg plugin (not as mature as bzr-git), we don’t know about something like hg-bzr except the hg convert extension, which does the hg-bzr conversion job.
Is there any important function that we missed having important consequences when deciding on two?
Finally, we use DVCS for all our needs (simple project, recordings ...), and we would prefer to stay on one DVCS / hosting, which can serve all our purposes and be useful in promoting git (hub).
What do you recommend?