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.
Free Subversion Hosting
I've been in a very coding-prone mood lately. I've been working on developing a Python ETR (Employee Time Record) script for a friend and his club here at the University of Arizona. The project has grown significantly since I started it and this is one of the first projects in a while that I've developed for someone to use other than myself and I've been wanting a way to manage my code better.
I did some searching for free subversion hosting. I've seen google code hosting before and looked at it's feature set, which is quite complete. In terms of project management google code hosting is probably the best for my needs. Though after reading through more of their help//support section I discovered that there's a maximum project creation limit of 10. Supposedly you can email support at the google code hosting service and work out a deal to get more than 10 projects but that's really a hassle. So I started looking elsewhere. Currently though the PythonETR script is hosted at google code.
I stumbled upon ProjectLocker which looked really promising. It turned out to be a very well put together system you get 300MB of storage and unlimited subversion repositories along with Trac instances for each repository. There's just a big HOWEVER in the middle of what seems to be an awesome service. The however is that there is NO public anonymous subversion access. If you want your projects to be available there's no way for you to allow the public to check out a read-only copy of your project. They also only allow a maximum of 2 user accounts and you count as one of them.
Once I discovered all the limitations of ProjectLocker I kept on searching. The next promising service I found was XP-Dev. XP-Dev pretty much one-up's ProjectLocker on just about everything except a few crucial parts. There's no Trac, they provide their own "project tracking" tools like: stories, blogs, wikis, bugs. There's no real way to associate projects with subversion repositories on this service. You get 1.5GB of storage and as many subversion repositories//projects you want to fill that up with. If all you're looking for is free subversion hosting with no project tracking then this is probably the service for you. Though if you're even the slightest bit paranoid about crypto this service definitely isn't for you. Most of the defaults are for non-SSL connections and the services that allow SSL use a self-signed certificate by XP-Dev. I did discover that they do allow public read-only access to subversion repositories but only if you choose to enable this feature so for private projects you don't have to make them publicly available.
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