I like the concept, but I have two objections to it. One, as pointed out by others, I'm highly skeptical of some of those edge cases. They mention a few of them at the end of that article, but they largely gloss them over saying they're dealt with automatically. My other objection is with Kiln itself. Not open source, not cross-platform, and even on Windows it seems to have strange requirements (like you can't run it on the domain controller). Sorry, any service that requires Windows is a automatic fail so far as I'm concerned.
Are you talking about the Kiln servers, or issues with client software? The servers are hosted, so you don't need to worry about any requirements or cross platform issues.
The servers. I was looking around on the site to try to find more info about Kiln, and one of the FAQs was the system requirements for the server (for companies that want to host their own Kiln instances I'd assume). With git or Mercurial I can spin up my own host in a variety of ways, or if I want something slicker I could host my own instance of github (not sure about BitBucket, but I suspect it likewise can be self-hosted). With Kiln if I wanted to go a similar route I need to have a Windows server with IIS and a variety of other dependencies.
Ah, that's old documentation. We host Kiln on our servers now, so we don't sell on premise versions that you'd have to install which makes this a bit moot. But if we do start to do that again, you would be able to spin them up the same way you'd spin up GitHub enterprise, with a VM: https://enterprise.github.com/faq
Considering my company bought into self hosted FogBugz & Kiln early last month I'm concerned that we need to start looking elsewhere now as we aren't going to see updates from here on...
It's quite sad as our company specifically can't hold source code and other information in an external environment (especially across borders) due to the nature of our client base.
When have you stopped that and what happened to the existing customers? Did you ever announce that? I have noticed that FogBugz is now in very fine print in the version for your own servers, so it looks like you want to kill that off, soon. How long do I have until I have to find something else for bugs? I'm very concerned about this!
Of course you are not killing off FogBugz! But what about the version for your own server? Is that going away or staying? I read your message like it's going away, otherwise you could have written that FogBugz will still be available for your own server!
I was really sad to hear this when our company evaluated Kiln a couple months ago. Off-site hosting is not an option for our company, so we had to go with another product despite strong user preferences for Kiln and FogBugz.
I hope a "firewall" install returns as an option someday, at which point we would eagerly reevaluate our choice...
I'm surprised that it can't be self-hosted, since the product is explicitly directed at enterprise. Any company with a large or important codebase is likely to want completely secure control over their VCS. Anecdotally, at least, external hosting would never fly at my company.
