Review: repositoryhosting.com 5/5

I've been using repositoryhosting.com since late august last year, and it seems like now is a about time to write a very small review.

The good stuff:

• Your choice of version control system:
• Git
• Mercurial
• Subversion
• Filestore with WebDAV included
• Trac
  Included plugins, selectable on a project by project basis:
• Agilo
• Timing and Estimation
• Discussion Forum
• Batch Modify Tickets
• Custom Roadmap
• Download Releases
• Markdown Macro
• Spam Blocker
• Table of Contents Macro
• Ticket Importer
• Wiki Backlinks Macro
• Workflow Editor
• Wysiwyg Editor
• Support for incoming mail
• Easy backups, both 
• hosted and
• easily downloadable (means no lock in)
• User-friendly frontend lets you easily
• create new repos, 
• add users, 
• administer permissions
• everything else you need to do
• Unlimited users
• Unlimited projects
• The price
• 2GB for 6$/month
• 1$/month/additional GBs

I use it for a couple of my spare time projects and I also have a kind of GTD task list in there.

The option to create tickets by mail is also really great. I guess almost every busy person has a couple of use cases for a working automatic mail-to-task-interface.

If you have read everything  carefully so far, you'll see that there is no list of bad stuff. The reason is I haven't found anything yet. (The closest thing I can come up with is if they will manage to stay in business at this price, when everyone else needs to charge more.)  I've only used it for 6 months though, so I might have missed something.

New use for subversion

Have you ever been in the situation where you need to figure out exactly how some legacy software works? I have too, a couple of times. This time I was trying to make a build server for some old Delphi stuff, when I suddenly realized that much of the hard work could be simplified considerably by using version control together with vmware workstation. So I thought it might be worth sharing.

Here's what I did:

1. Installed xp on a virtual machine.
2. Checked the Borland\Delphi folder from program files into a subversion repo on my physical machine.
3. Installed cygwin and did a ls -laR>>somefile.txt from windows/system32, and checked the file into subversion.
4. Exported each of the root branches from the windows registry to text files and checked them into the repository.

Now, for each upgrade I do, I can just check the new files into the repo, save a snapshot of the virtual machine and continue. If something goes wrong, rewind the virtual machine and try something else.

By having the registry dumped to text files I can at least use a good diff tool to see what each update has changed.

Hope this helps someone else, cause I wish somebody had told me this a couple of years ago.