ZenSRC

This is a follow up to a previous post about GitHub. While Git + GitHub have worked relatively well for my needs, I’ve found one deal breaker that’s missing from GitHub: http push. Http push simply means that you can commit your changes to a given repository over native http. That is a must have, since most of the time I sit behind a rather pernicious corporate firewall.

Lately, I’ve been reading about Mercurial, which in many ways is very similar to Git. For some good reference on the differences, check out this Stack Overflow question. If you’re interested in learning Mercurial (Hg), check out the tutorials at HgInit. It turns out there are some very similar services to GitHub for Mercurial, one of which is BitBucket. As you’ve probably guessed by now, the first listed feature of BitBucket is both http push and http pull. So, I used the built in git-mercurial conversion utility and moved my stuff over and have been happily coding away.

So, the basic premise is this: I work on a variety of computers at work and at home. Many of the aforementioned computers run different operating system (including Windows XP, Windows 7, Ubuntu, Debian, Sun, and OSX). On all of the computers, I use an application that provides a native console (usually bash) or provides an SSH terminal used to access a *nix-like environment. I’m a big linux guy, and like many linux guys, I’ve managed to heavily customize my environment. As you can probably guess, its a pain in the butt to keep a uniform environment going across all of those setups.

Some time ago, I setup my own Subversion (SVN) server on a personal NAS device. Using SVN, I’ve been pulling down my latest environment to each existing and new machine that I work on. Then, I use SVN to easily synchronize my changes across all of the machines that I encounter. This solution was working great up until a few weeks ago when my employer blocked an IP address range that included my home network.

While running my own SVN server has been relatively painless, I think it makes sense to pick a more robust solution going forward. After doing some reading, I’m giving GitHub a try to host those files that I don’t mind the world viewing. The process was relatively painless, and now my environment is stored here. I’ll follow up with my GitHub experiences after I’ve tried it out for a few weeks.