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Category: Nerd

Bye Bye Bitbucket

Bye Bye Bitbucket

A few days ago Bitbucket announced that they were ending support for Mercurial and will only support Git starting in about a year. I am a happy Mercurial user. It was the first DVCS system I learned, and have had no reason to switch away from it. Git is more popular than Mercurial, yes, but with useful plugins like hg-git, I never need to use Git even when I am working on a Git repository. Ultimately, the difference between Git and Mercurial is kind of like the difference between Windows and Mac (in that order). One is more popular than the other, but when it comes down to featureset and capabilities, it's very close. Like Windows vs. Mac, the main difference is the experience of using them, and I feel Mercurial is the clear winner.

I only use Bitbucket for their Mercurial support, so I decided to waste no time and abandon them entirely and immediately. In their place I am self-hosting an install of the community (open source) edition of Rhodecode. There are a couple of my repositories publicly viewable here. So far it seems like it has more than enough features to replace Bitbucket.

I feel I should point out that this serves as a reminder to me (and to you, dear reader) that cloud services cannot be relied upon. Companies, even if you are paying them, can stop serving you. This is at least the second time I have had to replace a cloud service with a self-hosted solution. A few years ago I replaced Google Reader with tt-rss. Like I wrote previously, because my new Mercurial hosting service is self-hosted, no one will be taking it away from me. And that is good.

Finally, I don't know why anyone would choose Bitbucket now to host their code repositories. Without Mercurial, all it has it Git, and Github (which has obviously been Git-only from the start) has already won: