Client-side bzr, server-side svn

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Ben Finney wrote:
> Howdy all,
> 
> I'm looking at some options for hosting a few small free-software
> projects. I'm finding that "free Subversion hosting" is easy enough to
> find, "free Bazaar hosting / free arbitrary storage space" is not so
> easy.
> 
> How feasible is it for me to use Bazaar exclusively on any
> workstations I use, but push branches frequently to a Subversion
> store? Can this be done with checkouts?
> 

Well, one interesting thing is that all you need is free disk hosting,
and you have server side hosting.

So even geocities, which only allows ftp access, could be used to host a
bzr project.

You can setup a bzr project on Sourceforge (bzr works just fine over an
sftp connection, which is how most of us actually use it). Also for open
source projects there is Launchpad.net. Launchpad has more explicit
support for bazaar, so you can browse the existing branches, etc. This
support will likely improve in the future, even as much as to include
bug tracking through bazaar commits, etc. (Commit a change which is
marked as working on a bug, and it should show up in the bug report as
being in progress, commit a change that marks it as fixed, and the bug
report should be updated. This is not complete, but it is being worked on.)

That said, there is a bzr-svn plugin, which should allow you to have
local bazaar branches, that interoperate with a subversion repository. I
have not personally used it, but a few people have, and to fairly good
success.

The bzr-svn plugin is actually hosted at Launchpad here:
https://launchpad.net/products/bzr-svn


It takes a little bit to set up, because it turns out that the python
bindings written by the subversion guys had a few bugs. And they have a
very long release cycle (months), so even though there are patches, and
they have been incorporated into the next release, you may have to patch
the current release to get it to work.

It also depends what bonus features you are looking for. For example,
there is work being done so that 'trac' (one of the big programs for
svn) can use bzr as a back end. It isn't complete yet, but I'm told that
with the latest version of 'trac', it works pretty well.

Other people might know more about specific details of the various
sub-projects.

But really, what are you really looking for in a host? I would guess
that launchpad.net would support almost everything you would need.

John
=:->
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