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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

Can we please talk about how terrible BitBucket is?

No syntax highlighting on diffs, horrible defaults (closing development branch when you merge into master???), not being able to make a PR after you make one commit to a branch without refreshing and loosing your message, inconsistent code formatting that is just horribly broken in general, weekly downtime that's not reflected on their status page, having to manually press a button to see updated diffs after updating a branch, no support for signed commits, API support lacking in the weirdest places, random failings in commit webhooks, etc etc.

God I hate it.

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I've also tried the 10 user licenses for both Jira and Bitbucket servers. I absolutely loathe Jira. I respect its vast featureset, but user experience as a programmer has felt absolutely abysmal. The React redesign only confused me more. To find the Kanban boards, you had to hit the search button! I hope Jira has improved since last time I used it, but I have to say I'd probably prefer just about anything else at this point.

As for Bitbucket.... It works, but I can't think of a whole lot it does that GitLab doesn't do better.

Yeah, Jira is horrible. Between the workflows, search filters (create one, apply it to a board, but then you can't edit it?) and everything else, it's really clunky to use.

I've done test runs with other tracking software, and I can't really find anything better. Every tool sucks in its own way. Do you have a recommendation on something that you've found that's better than Jira?

Not really. This seems like a largely unsolved problem.

At my previous startup job we evaluated Jetbrains YouTrack and GitLab issues. Both were fairly competent looking, both had nicer interfaces, but nothing has the same feature set or ecosystem as Jira. GitLab now has multi-project boards and help desk support, so it's actually getting to be pretty useful in it's own right for issue tracking.

I like Phabricator, it doesn't offer as much combustibility as Jira but the options it does have are good for software development workflows. Plus it is open source which is always a bonus

https://phacility.com/phabricator/

Is this link a joke? Reading down the page it gets progressively snarkier, definitely in a way that leads me to think this is satire.

The phabricator people used to have extremely bad taste in diffs and version control. See eg https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20756320/how-to-prevent-...

(I think you can turn most of the annoyances off. But it leaves a bad impression. They also seem to like PHP.)

No, it’s entirely legitimate. And thank $deity for those small pockets of humor.

Thx for the advice this looks like a nice tool. If there was enough "drive" of some dev's and a thriving community this could become a standalone alternative for Jira one day.

> doesn't offer as much combustibility as Jira

Autocorrect is such a prankster

We have recently switched to Clubhouse, and while the UI is a bit cluttered it seems like a good fit so far.

Use Youtrack, it is from Jetbrains. Very flexible (you can write forkflows in a programming language), much faster, great keyboard shortcuts and much better interface.

For tracking my personal task list I'm quite liking emacs org mode so far but I'm still getting the hang of it. It's not really a solution for teams though.

Jira is still horrible, I've only been using it a few months so I don't know if it's improved since last time you used it but if it has then it hasn't appreciably moved the dial from abysmal. I die a little inside every time I have to interact with it.

- Throw Bitbucket away, I don't even know why they wrote it in the first place - Use GitLab, even it's CE edition is a lot better than everything Atlassian does with Bitbucket and Bamboo combined

> closing development branch when you merge into master???

Why's that a horrible default? It doesn't happen to match the workflow you use? It matches the one I use. So I can understand it's not ideal for you but they can't suit everyone with a binary default so what makes it so 'horrible'?

Github handles it better. It lets you decide whether or not to close the branch, lets you protect certain branches from being closed, etc.

Bitbucket I use gives you the option as a checkbox upon merging.

Remember Atlassian in their infinite wisdom renamed the on-premises product formerly known as Stash to Bitbucket despite being a completely different code base to Bitbucket.com. I think they are talking about Bitbucket.com.

The bitbucket.com website gives a check box to select whether to close a branch though. Unless you mean that the on-premises product doesn't?

The on-prem one I use has checkbox when you merge. It's unticked by default.

The on prem version I was using a month ago had a checkbox, ticked the last way you checked it by default.

So if you merged feature -> develop -> master and remembered to delete feature it would delete develop by default as well...

So, if my company has a workflow where that box should always be checked or not, and rarely overridden by the user, ...

A default should not do something destructive or pseudo-destructive. That’s pretty much against most UX standards.

> It doesn't happen to match the workflow you use? It matches the one I use.

You're in the minority here. For the majority of software projects branches like `develop` are usually considered "long living" and are not "merged in" when arriving at `master`. That's why we have things like Git Flow [1].

Also an action that defaults to destroying something is user-hostile, so that's why it's a big deal and thus why GP wrote their comment.

  [1] https://leanpub.com/git-flow/read

I use the feature branch Git workflow. How do you know the majority of people here use Git Flow rather than feature branches? Have you just guessed that?

And anyway Git Flow still has feature branches that you close on merging!

Bitbucket provides free private repositories, which I really enjoy for personal projects. I never log into the site though, just a git server I don't have to manage myself.

Gitlab. Same thing, massively better performance, feature set, etc. And you have the option of taking it in-house should a project scale to the point where that's useful.

I migrated everything off BitBucket to Gitlab. I'm forced to keep a Github account because it's expected. As soon as enough people move away from Github to allow me to drop it, I'll migrate those too.

Exactly. They're just my upstream private hg backup and I couldn't care less what their website looks like.

You get free private projects with Azure DevOps too, and it's a great product to work it.

Bitbucket has been offering me free private repos for years, and it's basically never been down. It integrates perfectly in everything I use in my workflow, while sheltering itself from the hype train and avoiding providing useless features just because they are cool. Hands down one of the best products out there. My 2 cents!

> never been down

Oh, I beg to disagree. The last 8 months have been much better, but in 2015-2017 it was like 3-5x per year that I had to tell my boss that we can't deploy because Bitbucket wasn't triggering the CI server.

edit: come to think of it, I switched timezones from California to Asia. I haven't run into as many problems because no one is awake to break something :).

http://status.bitbucket.com/

It went down literally 3 weeks ago, preventing deploys. Fetching refs has a huge latency some days.

Syntax highlighting on diffs is not a useless feature.

“Never been down” is an outright lie.

https://status.atlassian.com/history

We keep an ifttt webhook into this page, very helpful to resolve the WTF chorus when something is busted. Props to Atlassian for transparency: please keep this going.

We use confluence, bb, and jira. The good news is that triad is very nicely integrated: you can easily crosslink issues between them. There is definitely room for improvement on uptimes though.

As I said in my original comment, the performance issues and downtimes we experience are just not present on the status page.

As one data point, several weeks ago it would take BitBucket over 70 seconds to respond to a `git ls-remote` with a repo containing about 200 branches. Usually this takes ~10 seconds or so, but it caused all kinds of headaches with Jenkins. On top of this pushes where incredibly slow.

Status page was all green.

Yeah we've seen that too.

They definitely need more alerts pertaining to slow API responses on the git interfaces. I still give them props for usually fessing up to outages. Some places (cough aws) will be out for hours before they admit to it -- not gaming any numbers, nope never.

I confirm this.

For syntax coloring in BitBucket, in Chrome at least, try the Refined Bitbucket [0] extension.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/refined-bitbucket/...

That one needs an extension to accomplish a fundamental feature in code tools is a bit ridiculous. Syntax highlighting isn’t even that hard.

I use this all the time, fantastic extension that makes it useable, unfortunately it's broken with the recent Firefox betas.

I assume this is Bitbucket.org?

Because Bitbucket Server (on prem) has been fantastic for us and is continuously improved. From what I know, it's a different codebase though (was once known as Stash)

there's no other tool at the same price-to-features ratio that Bitbucket gives.

The included Bitbucket Pipelines is also very very cool. at 30 developers, you pay a 1$ per month cost. Gitlab is at 4$ minimum.

Yeah but GitLab delivers a better service and if you don't even have 4$/month then you should write a new business plan ;-)

The problem is that everyone assumes all businesses operate out of the US.

4$ buys you 4 meals in India.

But the real reason is, startup funding rounds are generally 1/4th of the size for an equivalent stage as compared to the US.

every bit counts.

No merged PR builds in CI either. Bitbucket is terrible.

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