A Little Off Code, Computers, Photography and Guns

Free Hosting for Git vs. Mercurial

A co-worker and I were talking about version control software and he made an interesting comparison: Git is like MacGuyver and Mercurial is like James Bond. He then proceeded to point me in the direction of GitHub and Bitbucket.

From first impression both seem to have the same basic set of tools and features. Both have built in simple wiki's and issue trackers. Both allow unlimited public repositories limited only by disk space, 150MB for Mercurial and 300MB for GitHub. Mercurial allows one private repository while GitHub allows no private repositories without a paid plan.

Both of them have fatal flaws for Windows users. First off, GitHub is the most enticing because they offer an integrated subversion repository importing, just give it the URL to a SVN repository and you can import all the authors and history of it. Bitbucket however doesn't seem to have this feature, I'll continue looking for a simple way to do this but right now that's a major flaw in Bitbucket because all of my repositories until this point have been on xp-dev a free SVN hosting service I talked about in my Free Subversion Hosting post.

The major fatal flaw in GitHub for Windows users is that there's not really any solid Git clients to use with it at the moment. There's MSysGit which provides a very basic GUI and command line tools which is great but not very integrated or simple to pick up and use. There's a project for porting TortoiseSVN to TortoiseGit, though at the moment it heavily relies on MSysGit except it uses it's own ssh client plink instead of the OpenSSH library that MSysGit uses which means running pageant to manage your keys and importing and creaking a ppk of your private keys for use with GitHub.

Mercurial seems to have a major fix for the main problem with Git's poor selection of Windows clients is a major issue for usefulness in Windows. Mercurial wins this particular aspect of the competition. Mercurial has TortoiseHg which is pretty stable so far.

When it's all said and done Bitbucket and GitHub are more or less equivalent services built on top of two different version control projects.