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Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

Bitbucket (mostly via Atalassian) worked very hard to chase everyone off their platform in the vain hopes that the OSS community would start using Jira. Clearly they bet wrong, but unfortunately they aren't going to get any users back for a very long time.

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I've already moved 100 repos from BB over to Github. Free private repos on Github were not enough to get me to go to the trouble of moving, but then BB deprecated Mercurial, so there's no longer any reason to stay. I'm gone.

I just went through this as well. And I discovered that GitHub can import private bitbucket mercurial projects. That made it super easy.

Agreed. Turned out to be much easier than I expected.

I also don't see anything groundbreaking about Bitbucket as a Git repo interface. GitHub is miles ahead in both polish and mindshare.

Free private repos used to be the one thing keeping me (and from conversations, several people I know) on Bitbucket and once GitHub offered those as well, there was no incentive to stay. The Mercurial support was probably another unique feature they had from way back but they seem to have decided to remove that too.

yes, at the beginning, we thought github and bitbucket would be in a healthy competition for features and polish. But then Atlassian bought Bitbucket, and their agenda was, "make BB as awful as possible so we can steal whoever into our crappy corporate software" and that was that. I had to move not just because the issue tracker was garbage but also because Bitbucket's UX became horrible, not just the slowness but also the layout was very broken, having to read diffs inside of a tiny scrolling pane and things like that.

Yep, it was private repos for me. Once Gitlab came about and offered free private repos I bailed as quickly as I could from Bitbucket.

Free private repos is a real upside.

Central login where you can never understand what login you are using and what information they are collecting, nor on which website you are not whether you’ve suddenly integrated Confluence into a Bitbucket instance, is a real downside. God I hate SSO’ed companies, they went all the way of Google into Youtube.

> Free private repos is a real upside.

which isn't true anymore, as other pointed out.

Also offering Mercurial was a reason for choosing Bitbucket, but they are ending its support.

Free private repos are an upside over ... Github, which gives free accounts unlimited private repos? Gitlab, which does the same?

To be fair, Github only added that recently.

github offers these now for individual accounts.

this reminds me that I used to use bitbucket for the private repo and I just hosted some app code on .. github private.

Do you have a link or two for that?

nope just some email exchanges with employees which started with begging them for the most rudimental Bitbucket issue tracker features and fixes and ended with semi-explicit admissions that their hands were tied due to the "just move to Jira" corporate directive.

See "Want a more powerful issue tracker?" at the bottom of https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/issue-trackers-22... for the documentation of this policy.

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