Is stash better than Fisheye for hosting and management of a GIT based VCS?

Mohan Krishan January 10, 2013

Hello ,

We are planning to migrate our source code control system from clearcase to GIT and currently planning to evaluate tools to support a git based environment for hosting , browsing , managing repos and user access( Branch management as well) . Code review tool also needs to be evaluated . Could you please suggest - which is a best fit for GIT - Fish eye or Stash ? Do we need to use crucible only with either of these of Gerrit can be integrated as well ? we are already using JIRA for bug tracking .

Thanks,

Mohan

3 answers

1 vote
Jens Schumacher [Atlassian]
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January 12, 2013

Hi Mohan,

What code review tool you should use really depends on your desired workflow and requirements.

If you are happy to adopt a branch driven development workflow, Stash will be perfect for you.

If you continue to work heavily on master (or whatever your main development branch may be), Crucible might be the better choice right now since it allows you to arbitrary commits.

I haven't used Gerrit, so I can't give you a recommendation here... but as far as I know, it's similar to Pull Requests in that it isolates your changes on branches.

Another thing to consider when choosing a code review tool is adoption. Developers hate context switching and adding more tools than necessary will make adoption harder.

Hope this helps,

Jens

1 vote
JamieA
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January 10, 2013

In my humble opinion - don't consider Fisheye. It doesn't scale well. So far my experiences with Stash have been very positive, although feature-for-feature it does not compare with Github FI. The Stash team are making rapid progress though.

For code reviews you can use gerrit so far as I understand. You could also use crucible, although crucible doesn't work so well if the repository is not also in fisheye... it doesn't alert you to the fact that there are later versions of files etc.

Although fisheye can create git repos, afaik it does not serve them, but I could be wrong here. Perhaps fisheye could work, my experiences are coloured by trying to get it to index large amounts of svn repos (and perforce in a previous lifetime).

0 votes
cofarrell
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January 10, 2013

Hi Mohan,

It really depends on your definition of "better". As Jamie pointed out Fisheye is certainly a more fully featured product in some areas. As a Stash developer I may be a little biased but for the features you mentioned Stash is more than adequate, and especially on hosting and branches management Stash is a stronger choice as that is what it was primarily designed to do.

On code-reviews, depending on your requirements I would argue that pull requests may be able to serve your needs. We certainly use them internally on Stash for reviewing our own changes. Otherwise you could certianly use Crucible or Gerrit (see previous answer here) in combination with Stash.

Off topic - in a past life I had the pleasure of working in Clearcase hell, so I wrote a Git bridge to keep me sane. Not sure if you already have your migration plan worked out but this might be of interested.

https://github.com/charleso/git-cc

Best of luck.

Charles

PS Fisheye does support Git hosting, but that feature will be deprecated later this year.

Mohan Krishan January 11, 2013

Thanks For the Reply Charles .

For Code reviews now we have 3 options : Crucible or Gerrit or Stash pull requests . Which one do you consider best for integration with Stash . Ofcourse , pull requests are an embedded option with Stash . We need to consider :

Integration with our LDAP directory

Better management of reviews and interfacing with JIRA

Ease of use . more flexibility .

Also , since you mentioned git-cc bridge , Do you have any thoughts on how to migrate

Read only components in clearcase to GIT . We were using them by picking the required Read only component baseline and changing our UCM stream configuration . Actually these were seperate components resisding in a component vob . Any thoughs on this ?

Regards,

Mohan

cofarrell
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January 12, 2013

Hi Mohan,

Ahh, well obviously Stash has the best integration with Stash. :-P But seriously I'm afraid I couldn't really comment as I'm not all that familiar with either Gerrit or Cruicible. I'd would probably try them all and see which one I was most comfortable with. At this stage I imagine Crucible probably has the _best_ integration with JIRA, simply because it's been around the longest, but Stash is certainly improving in that area with every release.

Regarding migration - do it in stages if possible. At a bare minimum you should definitely start looking at getting a copy of your Clearcase source into Git and then re-sync on a daily basis. You should then setup a parallel build to validate your Git migration is working. All your other tools, like JIRA, need to evaluated and possibly upgraded for Git compatibility. Finally there is the question of training - are your developers comfortable with Git? One option is to actually get them to use something like git-cc locally so they can start sooner and be comfortable with Git when the switch finally happens.

I don't quite know what you mean when you mention read-only component in UCM. git-cc can certainly work with UCM and components, but be warned it doesn't really migrate streams/branches - see here for more details.

I should have also mentioned the other migration tool from Clearvision, which is probably a little more supported than my hacky python scripts, but a tad more expensive. I've not used it though, so I couldn't comment on how effective it is. From my experience Clearcase makes migration extremely difficult no matter what you do.

Good luck.

Charles

Mohan Krishan January 13, 2013

Thanks Again :)

So to summarize , If the organisation has multiple VCS ( GIT , SVN , Perforce ) , FishEye should be the choice . But if the version control system is GIT (Only) ..Stash is the best fit .... I hope no other community memebers has a second thought w.r.t this :) and i will proceed with Stash evalution !

cofarrell
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January 14, 2013

Excellent - well I'm glad to hear that. :)

Jens Schumacher [Atlassian]
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January 14, 2013

I just want to clarify one point: Git repository management in FishEye has already been deprecated last year. Support for it will end on 14 August 2013.

If you are looking for a solution to host and manage Git repositories behind the firewall, we recommend you to take a look at Atlassian Stash.

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