Public Mercurial hosting

[Thomas Weber]

Hi, 

I'd like to announce the possibility for Mercurial hosting for Octave
contributors at 
        http://hg.tw-math.de/
        https://hg.tw-math.de/

What follows is from the file "hosting-policy.rst" in the hosting-policy
repository at the above URI. I tried to cover most things in there; if
you have questions, please ask.


========================================================================
=====================================
  Policy for Mercurial repositories
=====================================

Summary
=======
Anything reasonable goes, if you have questions, send me an e-mail:
Thomas Weber <thomas.weber.mail_at_gmail.com>


Repositories
============
The public hosting is meant as an aid to ease collaboration among Octave
developers. If you don't want/need it, just go ahead as you did
before.  

If you decide that you want an online repository, drop me an e-mail.
Ideally, I should know your name from Octave's maintainer list; if you
are completely unknown to me, I may ask for some contributions send via
the list first. You will then get an answer with your username and a
password. If you have a preference for a username, include it in the
e-mail. Otherwise, I'll make something up from your name. I prefer it if
you choose something. 

Passwords are generated random passwords. Your repository will be named
after your username. [1]_ Pushing is private, pulling is public: Pushing
is only possible over https, pulling via http and https. Your repository
is visible to the world, please keep that in mind. 

New repositories will be initializied with a (somewhat) up-to-date clone
of John's tree by default. The idea is that most people probably have an
ADSL connection, where upstream is much slower than downstream, so
pushing a full 70+ MB would take some time. Also, is saves on the
server's bandwidth. John's tree won't be publically visible, however: I
don't want confusion about the official octave.org tree. 
  
If such an initialization doesn't make sense for your repo, please say
so in your e-mail.

Collaboration
=============
You can subscribe to any repository via either an RSS or an Atom feed,
in order to know what happens in other peoples' repositories.

Backups
=======
Easy, there are **none**. However, every Mercurial repository holds the
complete history, so the online repo is already a backup of your local
storage.

Hosting specs
=============
In case anybody is interested:

  - Virtual Server with 384 MB Ram and 10 GB hard disk space
  - 200 GB traffic per month
  - Debian stable (currently: etch) with Mercurial 0.9.5.

.. [1] If multiple people want to share one repository for a common
       development effort, they are obviously free to propose a name. 

========================================================================


Thanks
        Thomas