What to do with your Mercurial repos when Bitbucket sunsets support

526 comments

code August 20, 2019

Let's get this straight : Bitbucket (offering hosting support for Mercurial projects) was acquired by Atlassian in September 2010. Nine years later Atlassian decides to drop Mercurial support and delete all Mercurial repositories.

Atlassian, I hate you :-)

The image you have for me is that of a harmful predator.

We are a team of scientists working in a university. We don't have computer scientists, we managed to use a version control simple as Mercurial, and it was a hard work to make all scientists in our team to use a version control system (even as simple as Mercurial).

We don't have the time nor the energy to switch to another version control system. But we will, forced and obliged. I really don't want to check out Github or something else to migrate our projects there, but we will, forced and obliged.

I understand you are only interested in money and industry projects.

So be it.

Adios Atlassian. 

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tcuvelier August 20, 2019

@codeyou may also go self-hosted, at the scale of a department, that would make a lot of sense! That would also bring the advantage of not having changes in the interface without your users being informed.

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a4z August 20, 2019

What exactly does this mean for wikis , downloads and issues that belong to a hg project? 

will they be gone?

or can these be archived/kept alive, and just the repo goes offline, or do they all have to go away

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__jtalk August 20, 2019

A person who switched to Git from Hg years ago here. If I have to migrate all my old repos by hand, I’d rather migrate to Gitlab. Wanting to optimise your business model is one thing, doing it at the expense of our own time is another. Hopefully you guys will manage a built in migration tool by June 2020. 

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Joris van der Burgh August 20, 2019

@AmberVH while I understand the decision, I find it disappointing that there's no tutorial provided on how to convert the repositories. 

Just linking to a few tools and mentioning that no one size fits all means that we all need to research the various tools including possible pitfalls independently.
I think most users that want to convert their repository to git would want to do it while keeping all the named branches and tags. 

A bit of help here would go a long way in the decision of whether to keep using bitbucket. Tooling would be even better. (Github seems to have been able to build an import?)

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Alexander Gazarov August 20, 2019

@AmberVH Solution? You are supposed to be providing solutions as to how to convert existing projects to git. Your only solution seems to be "we'll delete all your projects, but we are gracious enough to not do that straight away". Great way to treat the users.

If I need to recreate everything from scratch, what is even my incentive to stay with BitBucket? I used it because there are private repositories and Mercurial support. Now GitHub has the former and you killed the latter. GitHub has a larger community and better integrations, so BitBucket is now inferior by all accounts. Coupled with such treatment of users, definitely won't recommend to anyone either.

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Nikunj Undhad August 20, 2019

@AmberVH If GitHub provides a simple process to convert Mercurial repo into Git. Can't you guys just create such user-friendly functionality and take this decision?

If Atlassian is planning for such feature let us know, so we can wait for that else we can migrate by ourself.

nAtE August 20, 2019

How will our Mercurial Bitbucket snippets be migrated to Git?

Please don't tell me I need to manually edit each snippet to toggle the repository type.

 

EDIT

I spoke with support and was told that Hg snippets just get deleted and there is no way to manually change repository type.

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pschoenmakers August 20, 2019

I'm sorry to inform you that we will sunset support for Bitbucket from september 1st 2019. We are currently migrating to Github, which we should have done years ago.

The Mercurial import offered by Github do look very polished. 

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zao August 20, 2019

@AmberVH Say that we find in the future that a public repository that used to live on Bitbucket was Mercurial-based and its issues, pull requests, and source code are no longer with us.

Will there be any way of obtaining at least the downloads and source code of the repo, or will they be truly lost to the sands of time?

A positive answer for this would alleviate a lot of concerns from a software packaging perspective where old dependencies with meager maintenance may be in use.

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Ed Lomonaco August 20, 2019

My team has a large amount of Hg repos and asking us to convert all of them ourselves is a massive hit to our time, especially when we pay for several of your services, I agree that a simple convert tool needs to be made, my team is honestly considering ditching bitbucket for github over this, like the others mentioned you essentially removed the one major advantage which was Hg support, I feel like this is going to be a fatal business decision on your part, for your sake I hope not, but github and gitlab might be getting a surge of new customers soon because of this blunder.

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AmberVH
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
August 20, 2019

We considered a conversion tool but ultimately, we discovered that our customer use cases are too varied and unique for an automated solution to guarantee consistent conversion results across all accounts.  We would have had to make vast assumptions about all of your workflows which could have caused more harm than good. (ie: multi-headed branches, invalid authors, obsolete markers, bookmarks, etc) 

At the moment, we are not planning to add a conversion tool for the reasons mentioned above. 

gpuleo August 20, 2019

kinda feel like making assumptions about workflows does less harm than deleting repos outright

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Alexander Gazarov August 20, 2019

@AmberVH So rather than adding an opportunity to migrate imperfectly you decided to simply delete all our stuff. Great solution.

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davidm_uk August 20, 2019

I have 43 Mercurial repositories, many tiny for personal projects and experiments which I put on Bitbucket so that I could easily find them in the future. You have provided great service to me over the years. I trusted that Bitbucket would continue to exist, and therefore so would my repositories. Sadly, the decision that you have announced today has significantly undermined my trust in Bitbucket and Atlassian.

I carefully evaluated the pros and cons of both Git and Mercurial when I migrated from Subversion, and there were good reasons for me in choosing Mercurial. I suspect others here made the same decision for similar reasons. Since Mercurial is more familiar to me, it and Bitbucket have become my default choice.

To find out that you're dropping support for Mercurial is very disappointing, but understandable given how much more popular Git has become.

To find out that you're going to delete my data unless I manually transfer it to new Git-based repositories is shocking. At the very least, I would have expected you to provide the option to migrate my repositories quickly and easily through your web interface. I would also have hoped that you would do this automatically before deleting my data.

I really hope that you reconsider your decision and at least make it easier for users to migrate Bitbucket-Mercurial repositories to Bitbucket-Git.

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Ed Lomonaco August 20, 2019

can't you at least just make the repos readonly? deleting people's repos just leaves a horrible taste in our mouths,

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Robert Futch August 20, 2019

For anyone looking for a one click import, I just tried this with Github. All you have to do is paste in the link to your repo and Github figures out all the rest. Worked perfect and better than having to learn some export to git and then re-import method. 

I only have a few users, repos and limited Jira use so switching to Github will be easy. Sorry to those large Mercurial teams. This is a serious bummer. 

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texnic August 20, 2019

It's a real pity. Github was more successful than (original) BitBucket, making git more adopted than Hg. Hg is awesome, but of course Stackoverflow users use Github and therefore Git. Github forces us to learn at least the basics of Git, and now BitBucket (!) does the same. A real, real pity. 

 

But I am grateful to Atlassian for the nice features I've used for my private projects (issues and pipelines, all nicely integrated with version control). I did see the positive development there, and I hope the experience will remain good and maybe even improved at the cost of switching to the less user friendly Git. 

I have a question exactly about the integration. 

Let's say I do migrate my repositories manually. What should I do to the tickets that refer to Hg revisions by hashsums? Do I need to manually find the corresponding git revisions and update all hashsums by hand?

 

A side question: People, do you know if Github offers a good automated  deployment to VPS functionality? 

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Joseph Heenan August 20, 2019

I have a mercurial repository on bitbucket that I was already investigating converting to git, so I was actually quite excited to receive the email announcing the sunsetting of mercurial.

I'm even quite happy to do the hg -> git conversion myself, that's no problem.

However it seems Atlassian haven't solved the key issue - there's no way to change a bitbucket project from mercurial to git, without losing all your issues, pull requests, re-adding the members manually, etc.

Is this still the case? Losing all that history that documents why various changes were made is a massive loss, and actually losing that is the only reason we've not already shifted to git.

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samja August 20, 2019

I wish it was the other way around! Mercurial is easier to use, faster, insanely good rebase feature, consequent in all its parameters, concise, etc. I love it more than git, really... :'-(

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RhodeCode GmbH August 20, 2019

@Dan Cumings RhodeCode ticks all your requirements from that list, but you'd need to host it on some cloud providers such as DigitalOcean or AWS.

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Ed Lomonaco August 20, 2019

@RhodeCode GmbHhe's looking to avoid that, we want a cloud hosted option, essentially what bitbucket used to offer until this announcement, we're more than likely going to switch to github as we have a couple things there and the tooling adoption is better.

kevin_karplus August 20, 2019

If BitBucket is not going to support Mercurial and is not offering any tools for moving Mercurial repositories to Git, what is the point of staying with BitBucket?  

I'll either be moving to Github (the place of choice for git repositories and one that provides a way to import a Mercurial repository as a Git repository) or finding a service that still supports Mercurial.

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Steven Peters August 20, 2019

@Adam Arpyou can use the bitbucket REST API to filter your repositories by type. In the following URL, replace `org_name` with your user name:

https://bitbucket.org/api/2.0/repositories/org_name?q=scm="hg"

That will give the first 10 matches; use the `page` argument to get additional matches:

https://bitbucket.org/api/2.0/repositories/org_name?q=scm="hg"&page=2

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Steven Peters August 20, 2019

It would be nice if there was continued read-only access to issues and pull requests beyond June 2020. It looks like there is a way to export the archive of issues, but it will be trickier to extract pull request discussions.

This is a bit user-hostile to be honest. I would be more likely to consider migrating from bitbucket-hg to bitbucket-git if the issues and pull request discussions were easy to migrate. But if it's just as much work to stick with bitbucket, why wouldn't I switch to gitlab or github?

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