Should Mailman move to Bazaar?

[Colin McMillen]

> this i would not consider a weakness of a project.  i dont see svn or even cvs offering hosting of any kind.  granted there are other sites that support those becuase they are the "big guys" ...
>
> a VPS is $20 at most and my <VirtualHost> tag in apache for my mercurial public pullable repo/https  htdigest secured push repo is 15 lines at MOST.  hell i could setup trac & hg repo[s] on a single virtualhost with probably 30 lines at most in httpd.conf and make a small http accessible page to change commiters to each project.
>
> i dont like the idea of crying for free/public/easy-to-use repo hosting as a "up" for a scm product.

It's a usability problem.  *You* may have the ability to throw
together an Apache-based vhost for your needs, but the average
developer is not you.  Big, important projects (like Mailman) probably
ought to be self-hosted and probably have someone who knows how to do
this extra setup (and pay the $20 for a server), but most open-source
software projects are not big and important.  If I'm the only main
developer on a project, I want to spend my time writing code, not
configuring Apache and paying a hosting company.

One of the strengths of Mercurial is that it's very easy to use for a
potentially "throwaway" project or prototype, because I don't have to
worry about creating a server, giving access, etc. But once it's time
to publicly release, the lack of a public hosting service is
irritating.  As far as I'm concerned, Launchpad is the only reason to
prefer bzr over hg, but it's a *huge* reason (though I'm currently
sticking with hg for now.)

(Note: I do actually have my own web server set up to host Mercurial
repos.  I'm not whining, but arguing that Mercurial adoption in
general is significantly slowed  by the lack of support from free, OSS
hosting services.)

Colin