I’ve moved goray from SourceForge to BitBucket yesterday. This also signals a switch from Bazaar to Mercurial. Along with other changes in the goray project, I think this will make goray easier to work with and contribute to. Read on for more details.

First off, goray builds much faster now. goray uses SCons Go Tools to expose the Go compiler to SCons. SCons Go Tools used to create another program (written in Go) that would parse the files for dependencies and unit tests. Now SCons Go Tools doesn’t rely on the helper tool. SCons Go Tools is also directly included in the goray repository, so there is one less dependency.

The major change to goray is the shift to BitBucket (and Mercurial). SourceForge and Launchpad are focused on large open source projects with hundreds of contributors, not the average developer who just wants to publish something cool. BitBucket and GitHub are excellent in their focus on repositories instead of projects. Sometimes, I want to host code that doesn’t quite fit into a project, but I don’t want to set up a repository on my own servers—my vimrc, for instance. BitBucket does the job nicely.

Repository forking is pretty nice, too. It makes contributing and sharing code much easier. I’m hoping that some people will find goray useful enough that they want to contribute — and now it’s even easier than before.

As far as Mercurial goes, I do like some of the features it has over Bazaar. I’m still partial to Bazaar’s ideas about hierarchical history and branches, but Mercurial’s patch queues and anonymous branches rock. Mercurial simply feels more nimble.

Anyway, check out goray if you haven’t yet (or look at the demos page).