Best Free Software project hosting?

I’m getting tired of running software.complete.org myself. Redmine eats up CPU like crazy when web bots hit it, despite me preparing the most restrictive robots.txt I’m comfortable with. So I’m looking at other options.

Some features I want (though not really showstoppers if missing) are the ability to close bug tickets via changelog messages, ability to script the uploading of new tarballs, and quick and easy operation.

SourceForge

Immediate fail. It feels like some seedy alley these days. Ads all over, terribly cluttered, and slow. No thanks.

Google Code

Initially it looks great. A couple of things bother me: one, they have a lifetime limit on 25 different projects. I have more than that in my git repos already.

They don’t directly support git right now, which is fine (I like using my own git server anyhow). But even for the VCS they do support, there isn’t a way to close a ticket without having to go to the website.

Savannah

Looks like an interesting option. Still the lack of support for closing tickets from the changeset. I hope that the service will stay around indefinitely, but not a big deal to me if it doesn’t.

Alioth

Similar to Savannah, I guess. Not sure what the pros or cons would be either way.

Overall

I haven’t been able to verify whether any of these will let me script the uploading of tarballs. In general, I write a lot of little programs and a few big ones, so lightweight tools that let me track open bugs in all my tools are preferred.

15 thoughts on “Best Free Software project hosting?

  1. Launchpad is completely open source now; it uses bzr for DVCS, and I know you can close Ubuntu bugs from package changelogs, but I’m not sure about projects in general.

  2. Bruce: I was going to mention gitorious in my reply but it seems to be targeted simply at hosting repositories instead of full project management. Also, John seems willing to use non-Free projects as evidenced by considering Google Code and Sourceforge.

  3. AFAIK, Google code allows fixing of bugs by mentioning them in changelog. I think I have seen this in reviewboard project.

    And of course there is launchpad as well.

  4. The big problem with Launchpad, for me, is that they only support bzr. I use git, and do not want to use bzr for my projects. I don’t mind keeping git repos on git.complete.org, but presumably I would then lose a good deal of benefit from integration.

  5. I’ll also say I prefer Free Software hosts, but it’s not as big a requirement as some of the other things. I’ll always have my local Git repo copy of course.

  6. There’s also evolvis.org which is pretty much the same as either
    Savannah or Alioth since it uses the same software.

    Closing tickets from changesets sounds interesting though (I like
    that from the Debian BTS). It might become implemented.

  7. Launchpad has continuous git imports, which is pretty neat. I’m working on a couple of projects which are hosted in git but we want to use launchpad for bug reports and code reviews, and so we just import git trunk into launchpad.

    Launchpad also has an API that will allow you to script uploading tarballs, making releases, manipulating bugs, code reviews, etc. I use an cron tool (http://launchpad.net/tarmac) to automatically notice, pull/test/merge approved branches into trunk.

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