Title: Repository Hosting
Currently the number of publicly accessible Mercurial repository hosting
solutions is rather limited. To deal with this Instant Messaging Freedom hosts
the canonical repositories for all of the projects under it's umbrella. It also
provides repository hosting for the developers of that project, including
crazy patch writers and Google Summer of Code students.
However, Instant Messaging Freedom will not provide repository hosting for the
general public. This is for many reasons, but the most important one is that we
do not have the compute nor the human resources to be able to support such a
However, if you do not meet any of those requirements, you can see our
[
guide below](
#sourcehut-repositories) for using [
sourcehut](
https://sr.ht/) to
keep your own mirror of any Instant Messaging Freedom related repository.
Once you have your own repository hosted somewhere, you are going to need
to be able to keep it in sync with the canonical repository. There are no tools
to do this automatically for you, but it's relatively painless with a few
The following will work for any URLs, but we're using the Instant Messaging
Freedom's HGKeeper instance as an example.
For this example, we're going to assume you have a copy of the Pidgin
repository hosted at
`keep.imfreedom.org/alice/pidgin` that you created by
pushing your local clone via
`hg push ssh://keep.imfreedom.org/alice/pidgin`.
You can continue pushing commits that way, but there's an easier way.
In the top directory of your local copy, you should have a
`.hg` directory. In
that directory is a file named
`hgrc`. The
`.hg/hgrc` file contains a list of
all the remotes and a friendly name for them under the
`[paths]` key. To make
things easier, we can add your remote there.
default = https://keep.imfreedom.org/pidgin/pidgin alice = ssh://keep.imfreedom.org/alice/pidgin Once you save this file you can now just type
`hg push alice` and Mercurial
will now push changes to
`keep.imfreedom.org/alice/pidgin` over SSH.
So this solves the initial problem, but we can make it even better by adding
an additional
`default-pushurl` remote to your
`.hg/hgrc` file as well.
default = https://keep.imfreedom.org/pidgin/pidgin alice = ssh://keep.imfreedom.org/alice/pidgin default-pushurl = ssh://keep.imfreedom.org/alice/pidgin This allows you to push to your copy of the repository by not specifying a
remote name at all. a simple
`hg push` will now use the value from the
`default-pushurl` which we set to your repository. This now means that the
only time you need to specify a remote name, is when you want to pull commits
from your copy of the repository.
To sync your repository with upstream, you can now just run
`hg pull && hg push`. This will pull in all changesets from the canonical
repository at
`https://keep.imfreedom.org/pidgin/pidgin` and then push them to
your copy of the repository at
`ssh://keep.imfreedom.org/alice/pidgin`.
## Instant Messaging Freedom Repositories Every developer, Crazy Patch Writer, and Google Summer of Code student gets a
namespace in our [
HGKeeper](
https://keep.imfreedom.org/grim/hgkeeper/) instance
under their username. Your access is controlled via an SSH key and are managed
manually by one of the administrators. You can provide as many as you like, we
just ask that you make sure they are password protected. You can use an
[
ssh-agent](
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ssh-agent) to avoid having to
constantly type your password.
To interact with these repositories is no different than any other. But you first
need to create them, which you can do via the
`hg init` command. Say you want
to create a new pidgin repository in your name space. You can use the following
command to create the repository.
hg
init
ssh://keep.imfreedom.org/alice/pidgin
You won't get any output from the command if it is successful. You can now push
an existing clone to it by making sure you are in the check out directory and
typing
`hg push ssh://keep.imfreedom.org/alice/pidgin`.
To avoid typing the full SSH URL every time, be sure to check out the
[
Repository Management](
#repository-management) section above.
## Sourcehut Repositories [
Sourcehut](
https://sr.ht/) is a collection of tools useful for software
development. The tool they provide that we are interested in, is hosted
Creating an account is free, but hosting code repositories is only free while
the [
site is in alpha](
https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/). However, pricing
is very modest and we highly recommend supporting them regardless.
Once you have an account, and have added an SSH key you can easily create your
own copy of any of the Instant Messaging Freedom repositories by just pushing
to them. For example, if your Sourcehut username is bob and your shell is
currently in an Instant Messaging Freedom related repository, you can type
`hg push ssh://hg@hg.sr.ht/~bob/pidgin` to push that repository up to
You can now use this repository just like any other, but to avoid typing the
full SSH URL every time, be sure to check out the
[
Repository Management](
#repository-management) section above.
