Mercurial is pleasant to use, we'd been burnt by two other hosting platforms prior, microsoft owned and not FOSS, diversity in FOSS ecosystems is a good thing (thankfully gitlab is starting to offer some). The only barrier to user bug reporting is fixing SSO with website to avoid creating a second account- we should prioritise that.
Pull requests, kobewi, I offer you and literally anyone who asks access ages ago. You literally just have to commit something and we get alerted in IRC. I mean it's right there in the repo description. Anyone who doesn't even care enough to ask...

I also would like to have alternative github version of repository that does handles different things and will allow easy people contributions.

Easy contributions? You literally just have to click on our repo browser and it tells you to just ask if you want to contribute. Commits are sent straight to our channel

I kinda feel that people who can't even bring themselves to care even a tiny tiny bit about the thing they want to help out with to the extent of looking into it.. Well. Too bad for them.

Nemo summed it up neatly. We like our independence. And it's true, Hedgewars was forced to migrate before. Companies and 3rd-party Git hosters come and go. Hedgewars stays.

I don't want Hedgewars on GitHub.

I like to add that GitHub is a proprietary platform. What I mean with this that some of the site functionality is broken without JavaScript. All (or almost all?) of the site's JavaScript is proprietary. Hedgewars is a free software project. So frankly, I think that depending on GitHub is just ethically incompatible with free software projects.

But being non-free is not the only reason.

GitHub is Git-only. We are using Mercurial. So we would have to switch our entire repository from Mercurial to Git first. Nothing against Git, but the transition is not going to be fun. Personally, I like Git slightly better than Mercurial. But both programs are very good. There is is practically zero benefit from a switch.

Feature-wise, I don't like the GitHub issue tracker, it's too primitive and is pretty poor compared to Bugzilla. The only thing you have for categorizing issues are labels. There are no components, no priorities, no severities and some features are broken without JavaScript. There are no dependencies, no issue groups, no “see also” feature. No input fields for hardware, version. There is no way to sort issues by priority or severity (which I consider to be very important!). GitHub issues leave LOT to be desired. GitHub would actually be step backwards.

The dominance of GitHub is worrying. It is dangerous if so many FOSS projects put all their eggs in a single proprietary basket. It is equally worrying if users become so dependent on GitHub, they never learn how to use anything that is even slightly different.

I agree that GitHub has usability in some areas, but I consider our independence to be more importance.

I also agree that our current method to report bugs is annoying, because you need a separate account.

As for posting features/code, we should probably write at least a workflow in the HWKB. Currently, it's messy, I agree.

Before I became a core dev, I contributed code like this:
- Forked Hedgewars
- Created bookmarks for every new feature (similar to “feature branches” in Git)
- Uploaded my repo on some random hoster (it really doesn't matter which one)
- Poked sheepluva or nemo to take a look

It's not ideal, but it worked.

Well, we have Content Creations. I don't think a new subforum makes sense, we don't have that many coders.

Off-topic, but whatever:

No, this is completely false.
Open source / free software is not about collaboration. It's about user freedom and ethics. Nowhere in the Open Source / Free Software definition it says anything about collaboration (look it up if you don't believe me). Hedgewars just happens to be a collaborative project. But there are tons of free projects that only have 1 developer, i.e. entirely non-collaborative. Besides, big proprietary software suites like MS Office are collaborative, too. Therefore, collaboration is NOT what sets free software apart.

I'd like to note that the workflow is considerably simpler now that I made that hedgewars draft repo. You can literally just commit to the main branch as if it's the main repo, and you don't have to notify us 'cause the bot will tell us about it.

And if you don't like mercurial (shame, it has a ton of awesome features and a way more user-friendly cli IMO) you can just use git-hg - although I would recommend submitting patches in bugzilla then...

Ok i understand your point, and will respect that, so would you mind if theres another game source version out there that is shared in some other stores / sites.

Thanks for the detailed insight Wuzzy.

I really don't understand the hostility towards Javascript. And towards proprietary platforms. Also, GitHub doesn't look like it's disappearing anywhere, seeing how it's the most popular VCS host. (and don't mention Google Code, Google just shuts down stuff)

GitHub can import Mercurial repository without any problems. I actually did it for my first fork. Going back would be the only problem, if you ever wanted it.

Lots of things you mentioned are already possible, but in different ways. Components/priorities/severities are possbile with proper labels. Dependencies and "see also" is possible with issue linking (you just need write the #issue number and it will be automatically parsed and linked, leaving a link CC in the mentioned issue). Embedding code is very easy too.

The whole idea about transition came from my experience with Godot Engine's GitHub (this again xd). It's A LOT bigger project than Hedgewars, with tens of issues/PRs being opened/closed each day. And it works really well without the features you mentioned as really important. I don't see why would that fail for Hedgewars. But well, I could understand that you are just used to the current system.

Well, I don't get it. It's just a service. It's not like they are going to steal all the projects one day or whatever.

Not many coders is a fair point here xd

It might be, but makes more sense together with the following sentence. There's a lot more players than developers (at least used to). The feature requests and bug reports will just pile up and unless you attract more contributors, this is never going to be fixed.

Anyways, I'm not saying the transition must happen, but would make some things easier for other users IMO >_>

This might be a bit belated but I would like to add my own two cents to the convo here.

I won't get into the above but I think that KoBeWi stated some sensible points in the discussion.

Thing is... most devs know what GitHub is and know how to git. I personally have never heard of Mercurial. It might be good, might not be good, but most people won't know about it which creates a barrier for entry to start contributing to Hedgewars whereas if you had a simple Git Repository every dev and open-source contributor who'd like to contribute to the project could do so without a lot of overhead.

I am just speaking from my perspective. I was going to start contributing to Hedgewars because I know how much love goes into it but not using GitHub is a deal-breaker for me when it comes to open-source contributions.

I fail to see how the domain of the game itself is "obscure" for the game. Hell. You managed to find this forum.
We've outlasted 2 major code hosting sites before switching to self-hosting, and joining the facebook of code is not an interest for anyone here. Feel free to maintain your own fork if you wish, and submit patches upstream...

You're more than welcome to start contributing immediately if your request was serious. Which... I suspect it is not.
Much like people complaining about the choice of programming language(s).

If it is, please drop by the channel, and I'll give you immediate access.

And yes, Mercurial is pretty awesome, which is probably why Google, Facebook and Mozilla use it. It had functional HTTPS long before git, functional large file support long long before git, a sane commandline, a great history query syntax. The only thing it didn't have was Linus and github.

Diss of the Year award.

But yeah, a switch to Git, let alone GitHub, is not going to happen. And I don't think there is anything wrong with that.
Even if Git is superior, a switch to a different version control is a risky and painful process, in which many things can go wrong, and even if everything goes right, there isn't much of a benefit.

Personally, I like both Git and Mercurial. I like Git slightly more but they're both pretty decent systems. I never had a problem that this project uses a version control unfamilar to me (when I started). I just learned it instaed of complaining. Besides, Mercurial and Git are very similar. It should not be hard to learn, if you already know Git well. There are even cheat sheets out there to “translate” Git commands to Mercurial commands.

When I joined the project, I had to learn many things that were unfamiliar to me: Mercurial, Pascal. Also my (small) Haskell skills needed a refresher. It's easier for anyone involved if I just improve my skills to match the project, rather than trying to change the project to match my skill levels. IMHO, the latter approach feels a little bit arrogant as well.

If anyone tried Phabricator, yeah, you know the thing. Self-hosted, full-featured, has Mercurial support, etc. Few big FOSS projects already use this and grow in peace
But it takes some time to actually fill the database with previous intelligence, even though it's worth it. If high crew finds it necessary, I can be of help with migration.

phabricator is ok I 'spose. I did install it locally once while we were trying out various solutions at work.
But, eh, it's not like it really wins us anything. mercurial has built in serving, the wiki works well enough, and our main issue with bugzilla is needing to sit down and integrate auth with drupal which phabricator would not really help out with.