Hosted bug tracking system with mercurial repositories (Summary of options & request for opinions)
- by Mark Booth
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 today (29th March 2010). 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.
SSL based push/pull? Website https login.
BitBucket, http://bitbucket.org/plans/, is primarily a mercurial hosting site for open source projects, with SSL support, but they have an integrated bug tracker and they are cheap for private repositories. It has it’s own issues tracker, but also integrates with Lighthouse & FogBugz.
Cost: $0, $5, $12, $50 & $100/month for 1, 5, 15, 25 & 150 private repositories.
SSL 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.
SSL based push/pull? Website https login?
Firefly, http://www.activestate.com/firefly/, 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.
SSL based push/pull? Website https login.
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.
SSL based push/pull? Website https login.
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 on their own).
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.
SSL based push/pull. Website https login.
Edit: 29th March 2010 & Bounty
I split this question into sections, made the questions themselves more explicit, added other options from the research I have done since my first posting and made this community wiki, since I now understand what CW is for. *8')
Also, I've added a bounty to encourage people to offer their opinions. At the end of the bounty period, I will award the bounty to whoever writes the best review (good or bad), irrespective of the number of up/down votes it gets. Given that it's probably more important to avoid bad providers than find the absolute best one, 'bad reviews' could be considered more important than good ones.
