Code hosting providers (was: Google Code Shutting Down)

[Ben Finney]

Mario Figueiredo <marfig at gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, 12 Mar 2015 15:26:08 -0700 (PDT), Josh English
> <Joshua.R.English at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > What is the recommended replacement for Code Hosting that works
> > reliably with PyPi and pip?
>
> Essentially anywhere where either Git, Bazaar, Mercurial or Subversion
> are supported.

Installing directly from whatever the latest revision in VCS, is not a
good replacement. What's needed is a VCS hosting provider that also
expects you to publish tarballs at specific versions.


For that, you want to choose a provider that runs entirely free software
for the service – not just the VCS, but whatever other features you use
need to be freely available for someone to run another instance of the
same service.

Otherwise you're stuck any time you want to migrate your project, which
is what led to this thread in the first place.

This is called “vendor lock-in”: services like GitHub and Google Code
lock you in to the one provider, because if you want to migrate you
can't take your project data (not just VCS but also issues, merge
requests, etc.) with you to continue somewhere else.

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,
etc. and all of it can be migrated to any other instance of the same
service.

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.

Good hunting in finding a free-software code hosting provider for your
projects!

-- 
 \      “I knew things were changing when my Fraternity Brothers threw |
  `\           a guy out of the house for mocking me because I'm gay.” |
_o__)                                      —postsecret.com, 2010-01-19 |
Ben Finney