It is now official. Py4J code has been moved to GitHub. The issues have been transferred there too thanks to a handy trac-to-github python script. I will be shutting down the trac instance on SourceForge. The web site, mailing list, and alternate download site will still remain on SourceForge (Py4J has always been available on pypi as well).
The decision to move to a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) was a no brainer. I tried mercurial for another open source project I work on, Qualyzer, and DVCS are clearly superior when it comes to merging and enabling collaboration. The speed boost is also quite welcome (thank you local commit).
The main question was thus: mercurial or git? Actually, the real question was, bitbucket or github? This was not an easy decision, but in the end, the numerous outages and bugs of bitbucket and the higher number of potential collaborators on github convinced me to go with github. In addition, github seems speedier and they developed a tool, hg-git, that allows mercurial users to work with github repositories.
I must say that I was disappointed with the issue tracker at github which is slightly inferior to the bitbucket tracker (only tags, no milestones, no automatic reference between commit and issues except when closing issues, no complex queries, etc.) and I just learned that their wiki engine was only recently moved to an implicit git repository: I believe bitbucket wikis have always been backed by a mercurial repository… Anyway, I just wanted to say this because I have read many posts bashing bitbucket over github and I did not want to sound like one of them…
