Re: A good web forge (~Gitlab) supporting Mercurial before Bitbucket's deadline (1st of June 2020)?

[Ludovic Chabant]

Hi!

> Sourcehut exists and it's already nice. But now it is very minimalist
> and it lacks some important features (for example an issue tracker,
> forks and pull requests). Moreover, it seems that people will have to
> pay even for basic accounts (we can't ask people to pay to send a pull
> request!).

(disclaimer: I'm one of the hg.sr.ht maintainers)

UI-wise, I think it will always be minimalist, as that's the kind of stuff Drew (the main sourcehut dev) likes. Feature-wise, it's also minimalist but with the community (yours?) help, we can improve it. That said:

- There is an issue tracker, see todo.sr.ht. Right now all the sourcehut "services" are kind of scattered, which is why you might have missed it, but there are plans to have "project pages" on the main site (sr.ht) which let you gather those up under a common umbrella for a given project (see https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht/131).

- We could add a "one-button-fork" but that's low priority, if even desirable (see second next point). You can already make your own fork by doing "hg clone URL1" and "hg push URL2" (where URL2 is an hg.sr.ht SSH URL... it will auto-create the repo in your profile).

- There won't be support for pull requests any time soon because the premise of sourcehut is to use email-based workflows. The reasoning behind it is that (among other things) it lets reviewers work on their patch queue offline, encourages them to try the patch, and lets them build advanced workflows and tools for handling large amounts of patches. Being email-based doesn't mean you can't have a nice web UI to follow what's going on, though (see https://lists.sr.ht/~emersion/mrsh-dev/%3C20180804160231.32283-1-sir%40cmpwn.com%3E). But of course that's not for everyone (just like pull-request-based workflows aren't for everyone either), so if that's a deal breaker for you, you can probably ignore sourcehut for the time being.

- A corollary of the previous point is that you don't need a fork to send patches. Hence the absence of a "create fork" button. You can just clone the repo locally and send your patches via "hg email" (see https://book.mercurial-scm.org/read/hgext.html#send-changes-via-email-with-the-patchbomb-extension). No extra steps needed! It's really a lot faster than with pull requests once you get the hang of it.

- Another corollary is that here's no need for using paid account to send patches.  Again, just clone the repo locally and start contributing.

If you have more questions, feel free to ping me or Drew on IRC (#srht) or on the sourcehut mailing list (https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss).

Cheers!