Code hosting providers

[Paul Rubin]

Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> writes:
> Any service which doesn't run their service on free software is one to
> avoid <URL:http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html>; free software
> projects need free tools to remain that way.
>
> GitLab <URL:https://about.gitlab.com/> is a good option: they provide
> VCS, file hosting, wiki, issue tracker, code review via merge requests...
> Also worth watching is Kallithea, a new federated code hosting service
> <URL:https://kallithea-scm.org/>. It supports Mercurial and Git for VCS,
> code review, and integrates with existing issue trackers. Because it's
> federated, you won't suffer from vendor lock-in.

Thanks for that informative post: I've been uncomfortable with the reach
of Github and you've done a good job explaining the reasons.

I personally use self-hosted git repositories on cheap VPS servers which
is easy to do, but doesn't supply issue tracking.  I know various
projects that use either Trac or Bugzilla but I haven't tried operating
those.

One interesting and very lightweight alternative is Fossil, which is an
all-in-one program that does lots of the same stuff as Git, Trac, a web
server, and a wiki, all rolled into a single C program that uses about 1
meg of ram.  It's written by the guy who wrote SQLite and it in fact
uses SQLite as the underlying data store.  It has a philosophical
difference with git in that it's difficult to "rewrite history" which
some workflows expect you to do.  I've sometimes wondered how difficult
it would be to modify Fossil to support that feature.