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We're using Mercurial at our team primarily, and have been on Bitbucket for the last six years as a company, so this is a huge letdown. Not to mention it comes within a year of the same happening with HipChat...
However, if you want help moving to Git (which we might end up doing after advocating Mercurial for years...) check out this: https://lombiq.com/bitbucket-mercurial-to-git-migration We have some free and open source tools for converting repos or otherwise you can hire us to do the whole migration and train your team.
As paying customer I at least expect that Atlassian will introduce a one-click-conversion function from hq to git AND autoconvert all remaining hq repositories automatically instead of deleting them after the final deadline.
While I'm sad to see a beloved version control system go, I'm excited to see what Bitbucket will be in the future. Now that features don't have to work with both git and hg, I'm hoping new features will feel more natural (natural for git anyway). It sounds like this will also accelerate development of new features which is :awesome:
@[deleted]There is the Issues import/export feature (Settings → Issues → Import & export), which you can use to move your issues between Bitbucket repositories. The Import/Export data format is documented, so maybe people migrating to other services can export their issues, and eventually find a way to convert them to the required issue import format used in the services they choose.
Also, for people who want to keep using the same URL path their mercurial-based repositories currently have in Bitbucket, I think it is possible to
back up your project source, issues and wiki.
delete the repository.
create a new git repository with the same name of the repository you deleted.
Push your source and import your issues.
I'm glad I started moving from Bitbucket at the beginning of this year.
I think this is a good time to think about how to make self-hosting easier for everyone...
Thank you, Atlassian & Bitbucket for hosting my open source and private repos in Mercurial for several years. When Google Code annouced it was closing down, I had to move from Subversion, and after some research decided Mercurial was definitely the better system to choose. Git was flaky, and still is - and has a user interface only its creators could like. Due to your support for the , you were the obvious choice for hosting.
I hope the sentiment expressed in this forum gives you an idea of the overwhelming need we have for a well-supported hosting option for Mercurial. We're not all saying "oh well, git won, let's roll over and convert". I'd take that Stack Overflow survey with a pinch of salt; don't forget SO is a place people go to find answers to problems... you're more likely to get answers from people having problems. That huge % of git users... is indicative of the huge pain in the *** that git is. Mercurial's easier, so fewer people query on SO. It's survivorship bias.
This is a terrible decision from an archival perspective - @philipstarkey said it well above: the public repos should be hosted in read-only form, indefinitely. This is source code we're talking about. Not just some unimportant drivel that can be thrown away without consequence. Software is eating the world, and you're about to destroy quite a lot of it. You have an element of social responsibility here. I make use of a large amount of open source software, and frequently have to go in search of it via the wayback machine. Don't let this code be unavailable, without an archive form, please.
Speaking about industry standards, would Atlassian consider removing Bitbucket support and migrating to GitHub? :-P Why would I choose Bitbucket hosting if not for Mercurial support? Please provide a list of pros for us to consider.
The message basically is, that even if you're a paying customer, the code (and all the associated data) that you entrust to Atlassian doesn't have a guaranteed life expectancy of more than 1 year.
Of course it is possible to convert repositories, at the expense of a lot of manual work (I'm soooo happy to have to migrate 100+ repos by hand...).
But some things will be lost (list not exhaustive):
Metadata history (issues, their link to Jira tickets, discussions...)
Build reproductibility of old software versions whose build system relied on hg how can we provide long term support to our customers?
The only solution to this issue is to provide a read-only access to mercurial repositories for several years after the shutdown (5 years would be a strict minimum, 10 would be more realistic).
If Atlassian doesn't at least do that, it will completely break my confidence in the company and I will push as hard as I can to shift away from their products.
Very sad news... I think that the <1% of newly created Mercurial repositories would be (much) higher if Mercurial would be the default choice instead of Git. I think that some (many?) new BitBucket users have created Git repositories because they simply did not change the default settings... so, the number of newly created Mercurial repositories shows the number of repositories that are intentionally created as Mercurial ones.
Do you really have to drop the fundamentals BitBucket was build upon?
I tried to preserve the edit history of the Wiki by converting the repo from Mercurial to git with hg-fast-export, but I could not figure out how to convince GitHub of accepting that.
Mercurial and BitBucket's support is what has locked us into Atlassian and why we use Jira and other Atlassian products.
When moving to GIT - it is very unlikely that we will stay with Atlassian as our cloud provider as there are lots of better products on the market that work with GIT.
I dare say this is the same for other development companies. When you throw out HG, you also throw out the need for it's integrations. Good bye Atlassian - not just BitBucket.
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Atlassian, I hope you realize you're pushing your users to Microsoft.
You closed down HipChat and Stride this year, both of which had their merits compared to Slack. So, some people went to Microsoft Teams, we included (it's free with Office 365, which a huge chunk of companies already use to get Office and e-emails, services that you don't provide). Heck, we did it even though we had to write the migration tool ourselves.
Now you get rid of the one unique selling point of Bitbucket compared to GitHub or even Azure DevOps, both of which are Microsoft services (I honestly don't see the benefits of BB compared to them, apart from being cheaper but also having big drawbacks). If it's about Git hosting, why not go to GitHub? And this time we even have a migration tool ready.
What will be next, in 2021 will you delete all existing JIRA projects in favor of "next-gen" ones? 2022 will bring the removal of all Confluence pages that were created before the new editing experience?
Basecamp keeps old versions forever, until at least one person uses it. Might not be the best way to do business (though they're doing fine it seems), but with them I can be sure that a) they won't suddenly do deep changes to a tool that I need for productivity every day and b) they won't delete my data at a 10-month notice. Data that I have in hundreds of instances and can't easily export automatically, mind you.
Keep in mind that the majority of your users are developers. They'll develop the necessary apps to move away from your services if you upset them with stunts like this, they're not ordinary users who just have what you give them, they have a lot more choices.
The code for my Master's project is in several Mercurial repos. By not providing a way to convert to git, this basically makes my project useless to future researchers.
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