Bitbucket, sourcehut, self-hosting, dropbox, poor man's solution

[Michael Forbes]

> On Aug 22, 2019, at 12:21 AM, Uwe Brauer <oub at mat.ucm.es> wrote:

> However, it also might be that in the future sourcehut will drop
> mercurial support
> (in order to provide «better service» for our customers)

The big difference is that sourchut's software is open source, so you can in principle (have not yet actually tried) continue to run it on your machines.

> Usually it is advised against the use of dropbox, that is coping a
> repository to a dropbox folder and share it with collaborators.

I would strongly caution relying on Dropbox.  A while back, they recently dropped support for all filesystems on Linux except ext4 while basically killed it for a number of use-cases.  (I used to use in on CoCalc - a very useful hosted virtual machine platform that ran in the cloud, and hence could not use ext4).

> But would the following be possible (without data corruption)?
> 
>    1. Copy a repository to a dropbox folder (say mercurial-repositories)
> 
>    2. Clone the repository from that dropbox folder, to my local
>       directories. Say
>       $HOME/.Dropbox/mercurial-repositories/repo1
>       to
>       $HOME/repo1
> 
>    3. Push and pull between these two repositories
> 
>    4. Share
>       $HOME/.Dropbox/mercurial-repositories/repo1
>       with a collaborator but tell him/her to clone the repository not
>       to work on it directly.
> 
> Doing this is not really using a self-hosting service, 
> 
>    1. no issues(although one could use a mercurial extension such as artemis),
> 
>    2. No notify (but one could use an extension)
> 
>    3. wiki etc
> 
> Any comments? Anybody tried that approach? It is safe?

Also, as has been mentioned before, dropbox's sync may not be atomic, and repository corruption - though not common - is a real possibility, especially if your collaborators forget to not use the dropbox repo.  The real issue is that if the store gets corrupted somehow, dropbox will happily push that corruption to everyone for you!

Michael.