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 thing.

However, if you do not meet any of those requirements, you can see our guide below for using sourcehut to keep your own mirror of any Instant Messaging Freedom related repository.

Repository Management

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 simple tweaks.

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.

[paths]
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.

[paths]
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 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 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 section above.

Sourcehut Repositories

Sourcehut is a collection of tools useful for software development. The tool they provide that we are interested in, is hosted Mercurial repositories.

Creating an account is free, but hosting code repositories is only free while the site is in alpha. 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 Sourcehut!

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 section above.