[patates]

Their abrupt cease of support for mercurial damaged it beyond repair for me and many others. They didn't even offer to migrate stuff with the click of a button, people started writing scripts to migrate, and while you are migrating, why not to GitHub which in the meantime also gained free private repositories?

[maccard]

> Their abrupt cease of support for mercurial damaged it beyond repair for me and many others.

I'm not the biggest Atlassian fan, but they posted in August last year, gave 10 months notice and cited that less than 1% of new repos being created are using mercurial as their primary reason for doing so. If you cared about a project, almost a year is plenty of time to move it. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to sunset a feature that is not widely used by your users, not widely used outside of your userbase, and that requires ongoing maintenance that the other 99% of repositories could benefit from instead.

[patates]

It was more like a community and they destroyed it. Less than 1% of new repos were mercurial (what a surprise with zero mentions of mercurial anywhere except small text and zero marketing and they didn't even have it in their self-hosted product), sure, but existing repos were the problem. Some abandoned ones are lost forever. At least archive them, offer a tar download, anything... People had to parse the issues, people had to parse discussions, all the settings, access rights... I think after a year they could put everything in archive mode, but no, they deleted it with no easy export.

That's not OK and I'm clearly very, very angry as a former user.

[maccard]

> I think after a year they could put everything in archive mode, but no, they deleted it with no easy export.

I mean, it's still there. If it's that much of an issue, and the tooling has been made by the community, you're free to archive it now. At what point is it ok for them to say "hey, we don't want to pay to store the data/keep the codepaths to display/interact with this data" anymore?

How many of those people were paying customers before this? I don't know the answer offhand, but if I had to guess, I'd suspect a small number of them.

> That's not OK and I'm clearly very, very angry as a former user.

I hope as a paying customer, you cancelled your subscription to them and told them explicitly why then.

[patates]

> At what point is it ok for them to say "hey, we don't want to pay to store the data/keep the codepaths to display/interact with this data" anymore?

At the point when they make it super easy for the people to archive the data themselves. Code part is easy, PRs, issues and downloads are hard. See: Google takeout

> I hope as a paying customer, you cancelled your subscription to them and told them explicitly why then.

Not just even for me, I made my company switch to it, and we were also hoping support for mercurial in the future, but were okay with it not supporting mercurial in local deployments, we had our hg repos on bitbucket.org. When the news broke, I moved to GitHub and perkeep (for archiving all the JSON data that I painstakingly had to scrape), and my (now former) company found a smaller vendor that offered what BitBucket was supposed to offer but never delivered, only for 100x the price (although one-time, custom development for them).

[nix23]

>abrupt cease of support for mercurial

Yes exactly that, i think for bit-bucket it would have been less damaging NOT to support git but exclusively mercurial..and maybe bitkeeper ;)