How to manage an open-source project using mercurial and Google Code?

Question

I have an open source project hosted on Google Code using Mercurial. It works great for me, i generally love mercurial.

I have several community members who clone my project, make changes to their clone, and periodically like to send me patches. These contributors do not have commit access to the master repository, aka the "Fork + Pull" model.

We haven't really found a good way for them to send me contributions. If they have the foresight to put all of their changes for a given feature onto a named branch in their clone, it's easy for me to pull just those changes into the master. However, they often don't have that foresight since many of these changes start out as local tinkering on their default branch.

Another alternative is to mail around diffs using hg export and hg import, but that seems rather 1974.

It's possible there may be an answer somewhere in mercurial queues, but that's always seemed like a feature oriented toward "power users", and many of my devs may be experts with git but are complete n00bs when it comes to hg. We're still trying to get unnamed branch merging down, I'm loath to encourage them to play around with something that complicates the mental model even further, especially when I know so little about the subject.

I feel like I must be going about this wrong. Github seems to have a good story for this with its concept of pull requests. What's the best way to accept contributions from community members when using mercurial on google code?

Answer 1

Use BitBucket. It's pretty much GitHub for Mercurial. It's got pull requests, an issue tracker, wikis, etc.