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Comment by lutoma | Hacker News Reader

> I also would expect that Github eventually will also offer mercurial repos.

How come? That seems highly unlikely to me, especially when you consider that one of their larger competitors (Bitbucket) had Mercurial support for a long time and then removed it.

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In fact Bitbucket started as a Mercurial hosting service, then added Git support, then dropped Mercurial.

From when they dropped Mercurial in 2020 [1]:

"Yesterday marked an end of an era for Mercurial users, as Bitbucket announced to no longer support Mercurial repositories after May 2020. Bitbucket, owned by Atlassian, is a web-based version control repository hosting service, for source code and development projects. It has used Mercurial since the beginning in 2008 and then Git since October 2011."

[1] https://hub.packtpub.com/bitbucket-to-no-longer-support-merc...

That change was so dumb. Mercurial support was the bit that put them as something different from github. Once they didn't have it anymore, why would anyone use them at all?

I'm sure they knew what they did. They probably primarily had git users on the service, and the motivation to use Bitbucket is most likely because you already pay for other Atlassian products.

So since you are knowledgeable about the fact that this decision was "dumb", you must also know approximately what proportion of their users were dependent on hg for their workflow ? My priors would put it at less - likely far less - than 1%. But please share your knowledge.

Not true. I looked at the complete list of hosted projects on Bitbucket just when it was shut down and I recall that at least 10% of all repos ever created on Bitbucket were hg repos.

In the announcement they mentioned that less than 1% of new users were choosing hg. It was probably slightly higher for old users.

> In fact, Mercurial usage on Bitbucket is steadily declining, and the percentage of new Bitbucket users choosing Mercurial has fallen to less than 1%.

https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-b...

Still seems near-sighted. If someone started a new mercurial project what would they choose to host it on? BitBucket basically automatically wins new users by being the only player in the game

They gave away free private repositories when Github was charging $7/month. That's the only reason they had most of the users they had.

FWIW I had stuff on Bitbucket from the Before Atlassian times, in Hg repos. And while I had let it bitrot a bit (too complicated to work on open source stuff with my employer at the time), once they dropped Mercurial support I saw no point in moving it to git and keeping it there so I just pulled it off and move it to github.

I'm sure I'm not the only one. The compelling story about Bitbucket for me was Mercurial.

Plus Atlassian is kind of just an awful company.

> Plus Atlassian is kind of just an awful company.

How so?

One huge advantage for them compared to GitHub is that they offer an on-prem version. That is much more relevant than Hg support of all things.

It also gets bundled with Jira and Confluence.

The hosted Bitbucket and Bitbucket Server (formerly called Stash) only share the name. They are completely different implementations and Bitbucket Server never supported Mercurial.

GitHub has GitHub Enterprise Server?

Isn't Bitbucket owned by Atlassian? Nobody uses any of their products by choice. They sold some enterprise contract to your boss's boss.

Yes it’s also been rewritten since acquisition which was when hg support was dropped afaik

Why was it rewritten?

If i recall correctly the server/enterprise version was completely separate product written in java (as opposed to python which powered original bitbucket.com). I think the java eventually subsumed the cloud product but not too sure of that

Bitbucket is not bad. It has features I miss in GitHub, particularly the larger selection of PR merge strategies so I can satisfy my git history OCD.

Probably the Atlassian product I hate the least.

They still have a much better PR/review workflow than github. (Imagine github if reviewing showed changes since your last review by default, and it worked, and you didn't have to make junk comments to get something to count as a review, and comments didn't get lost).

You're talking Web site, not version control system.

Annoys the fuck out of me, this conflating git with GitHub.

> You're talking Web site, not version control system.

Yes, because we're talking about comparing BitBucket and GitHub when both are using git. Did you reply to the wrong comment?

> Did you reply to the wrong comment?

Naah, just misunderstood the context,I think. :-)

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