Since they make a repo mirror every time they pull, why don't they have a backup? Do their developers never communicate with each other? (Why are they using github as their build repo?!)
With mercurial, you can just run "hg serve" or "hg -p [port] serve", FWIW. (That's for a read-only repo, though. There's a bit more setup involved before people can push to an http repo.)
With monotone ("mtn serve", done. Auth is taken care of at the repository level) and darcs it looks even easier.
For the record, the author of those flowcharts is completely missing the point. You can just as easily call `git update-server-info` and copy the .git from your repo into a web-accessible directory, and just be done with it, the same as Darcs.
The reason people do it other ways (either via git-daemon, gitosis or ssh) is because Git uses a special transport protocol that's far more efficient than a dumb HTTP session. It's not that Git won't work over a dumb HTTP session, it'll just be a lot faster using it's own server/protocol.
All of the alternative tools - bzr, hg, darcs - have highly optimized protocols as well. This may be a documentation issue - I've never seen documentation for using a dumb server with git. Also, can clients submit changesets back via simple FTP? Darcs can, IIRC.
No FTP support, but that's insecure; what's wrong with using SSH? And there is documentation on the Git website (and in the source tarballs) on how to set up an HTTP-hosted repo, and even how to set up for a WEBDAV-enabled push repo, although I've never attempted the latter.
> Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that git makes hosting your own public repository absurdly complicated (http://weblog.masukomi.org/2008/03/11/sharing-a-public-git-r...) compared to other tools (http://weblog.masukomi.org/2008/03/11/sharing-a-public-darcs...).
With mercurial, you can just run "hg serve" or "hg -p [port] serve", FWIW. (That's for a read-only repo, though. There's a bit more setup involved before people can push to an http repo.)
With monotone ("mtn serve", done. Auth is taken care of at the repository level) and darcs it looks even easier.