Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by timv 3622 days ago
Bitbucket has remained a standalone product, but I don't think many of its original mercurial userbase feel like it's been "safe".

When Atlassian bought bitbucket it was the place to host mercurial repositories. Now it's a git hosting service that hasn't gotten around to turning off mercurial support yet.

3 comments

Hi timv, Bitbucket engineer here. I'm not on the PM team, but to my knowledge we have no plans to discontinue Hg support. The Bitbucket repo population is roughly 90% Git and 10% Mercurial, but due to our scale that is still a freaking huge number of Hg repos. We also hired one of the core Mercurial contributors last year to ensure we continue to improve our offering for both DVCSs. Of course I can't personally guarantee anything, but if I were an Hg user, I'd feel pretty confident that Bitbucket's support isn't going anywhere in the foreseeable future.
In fact, we just launched Hg support for Bitbucket's built-in CI/CD, Bitbucket Pipelines:

https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/07/26/bitbucket-pipelines-be...

Is that Atlasian or the general decline of HG? I havent installed HG in a few years now, and i am seeing the big projects still on HG switching to git.
Apparently Mercurial still accounts for 10% of BitBucket repos. That could be a profitable niche for a smaller company.

Also, most of the projects I've seen switch to Git have moved to GitHub. Partly network effects, partly Atlassian.

It would be a terrible move to disable mercurial support since Bitbucket is pretty much the only place you can host your Hg repo remotely with reputation. Other competitors just aren't up to bar.