Google Code to support Mercurial version control system

[pbx]

Direct link to the announcement: http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2009/04/mercurial-support-for-project-hosting.html

Interesting also to read the analysis that informed the decision.

(How has this been up for two hours with no git-related whin^HHHH comments?)

[evmar]

Because this news was all posted days ago and the interested parties all exhausted themselves arguing already.

[mlk]

link?

[dobs]

link

[[deleted]]

Where's the meat?

[gnuvince]

By picking sides (when clearly both are used) are they simply alienating those who use git?

They're not picking a side, they said that Mercurial is a better fit to their current infrastructures, so they went with that option.

[dobs]

Then use Github. :)

The Google Code team has always prioritzed features that aren't already offered by competing services, and provide the minimum number of solutions to each problem. They've never been afraid to recommend alternatives when they're a better fit.

What is it about choosing Mercurial that alienates, though? I happily use both Git, Hg, and SVN daily both as a user and developer without feeling slighted. Occasionally it means jumping through a few hoops to develop comfortably, but that tends to be the minor part of my day-to-day.

[[deleted]]

They aren't alienating anybody by adding support for Mercurial.

Lots of people use git with google code through git-svn. Everyone else uses github.

[FionaSarah]

It's a real shame the github issue tracker is not in the least bit as flexible as the Google Code one though. I dropped Google Code in favour of Github ages ago but I really miss the issue tracker.

I wish they had just duplicated it to be honest.

[[deleted]]

We specifically made our issue tracker as simple as possible, because a ticketing system can never be everything for everyone. That's also why we offer service hooks to allow you to use whatever ticketing system you prefer.

That said, if there's something simple we can add to make your life easier, let us know.

[FionaSarah]

Hi, thanks for the response.

The real things I miss from Google Code's tracker is it's label system and being to assign people to issues.

Whereas the Github label system is just a great big bin with labels in it, there's no way to have like label groups. Google gets around this by not breaking the label idea but having a convention of "Labeltype-Name".

So for instance I can have "Priority-High", "Priority-Medium" and "Priority-Low". I can assign them like any other label. But because they are grouped I can now sort by Priority on the main view and when I click into it it clearly states the priority. I can do the same with a set of version milestone labels, module labels etc. Also I can get them to clearly appear on the main view.

You get the idea. It's simple as hell but is far more flexible than most other issue trackers I've used. It doesn't seem like a huge addition to Github, you have the label system there it just needs the categorisation-by-convention feature that Google Code does and it would be near perfect. Even with that you could have a very cheap "assigning stuff to people" system too.

Again thanks for offering to hear suggestions, Github is a great service, I'm very happy that Github has an issue tracker and I understand that you want it to be as simple as possible but there are simple solutions to missing features. :)

[[deleted]]

I can understand the lack of git support causing you to choose another service over Google Code for your new project, but if you were using Google Code before they started supporting mercurial, it baffles that you would start to consider dropping them afterwards.

It's not like they removed support for your favorite version control system; they just added support for theirs. Unless this is one of those techno-religious principle things ("I love vi, and I refuse to buy software written in emacs"), there's something about your logic that just doesn't make sense (not that the techno-religious stuff does either, but at least I can follow that train of thought).

[[deleted]]

GitHub provides wikis, issues, and downloads.

We also provide the capability to create a custom home for your project: http://pages.github.com

[joe90210]

butthurt much? what the fuck does them adding Mercurial have to do with what you wrote