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Comment by ndnxhs | Hacker News Reader

I'm amazed bitbucket still exists considering both gitlab and github are so far ahead of it. I have to use it at work and its missing half the features I need.

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I'm only a Bitbucket user because it's the only way I can get hosted Mercurial repositories. The Mercurial workflow is a lot simpler than Git and was much easier to learn. Git expects you to want to mess with history and accumulate changes into a special "staging" changeset before committing which just felt odd compared to Mercurial where I can commit and then keep amending the same commit.

You can amend commits in git. But it sounds like you're doing it wrong anyway. If anything you want to make more numerous, smaller commits, and that's what staging is good for.

I've had far better success introducing Mercurial to developers new to DVCS - anecdotal only.

Mercurials phase system is really nice, but with git you can selectively push branches. However simple this might seem, it's the cause of quite a bit of friction.

TortoiseHg makes visualizing the tool and repository quite simple, and it covers most of the day-to-day work.

I now have multiple developers able to manage advanced workflows, and unfuck a repository if someone did something braindead. After 1 year with git I was still the only person able to unfuck repositories, and it happend a lot more frequently than with hg.

True. I've never tried hg or tried teaching it to developers but I am still the only one able to unfuck a repository after trying to teach people git (the DAG) many times. I think it's probably because of my background in C programming and having the idea of pointers/references so deeply embedded. Programmers who don't know this already can't seem to get it.

To be fair, hg and git are so similar that you can convert between them almost 1:1. But something about hg just makes it work better for devs new to version control in my experience

Curious, what features do you need that are missing? We use bitbucket but honestly I never log into the interface (because it does seem just like an unnecessary visualization of what I can see on the command line). It's mostly just a hosted backup for our repo.

So maybe I'm missing a ton of awesome features that github/gitlab provide?

The change review interface is awful: no way to indicate when its done and needs to be cycles from either end. I loathe the way in which navigating histories and contexts for changes don't work: if I want to search for a past change by commit message it is grep time.

Atlassian more or less gives bitbucket away, so it checks the box for management who care more about license cost than developer happiness/productivity.

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