Bitbucket Mercurial Support

» see bitbucket.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I came out of the version control argument of the late 2000s on the Git side, like nearly everybody did, and not because I had sat down and compared the two carefully. Mercurial was the option with the better manual and the friendlier commands, and it lost anyway, for reasons that had very little to do with the software. This grave is for the specific afternoon that loss became permanent.

Bitbucket launched in 2008, built by a Danish developer named Jesper Nøhr, and for its first three years it hosted Mercurial and nothing else. That is worth stating plainly, because the service that eventually deleted every hg repository on it was a Mercurial company first. Atlassian bought it on 29 September 2010 and added Git support in 2011, at which point the platform's own numbers started their slow slide in one direction.

On 20 August 2019 Atlassian posted that Mercurial support was ending. New hg repositories stopped being creatable on 1 February 2020. The original removal date of 1 June 2020 was pushed by thirty days, and on 1 July 2020 the repositories came off the service, along with their wikis and snippets.

~ the dossier ~

~ why git won ~

Both tools solved the same problem in the same year, 2005, both because the Linux kernel needed to stop using BitKeeper. Mercurial was arguably the more considerate design, written in Python, with a command set that behaved the way a person would guess. Git was faster and stranger and had a data model you had to actually learn.

None of that decided it. GitHub launched in 2008 and made the network effect the product, so that the interesting question stopped being which tool you preferred and became where the code you wanted to read already was. Atlassian's own justification cited a Stack Overflow survey putting Git near ninety percent adoption against Mercurial's three, and noted that under one percent of new Bitbucket signups were choosing hg. Supporting two version control systems, they wrote, means splitting focus and doubling the work. That is true, and it is also the sound of a market closing.

~ hosting is not archiving ~

The part worth remembering is the deletion. Atlassian gave eleven months of warning, published migration guides, pointed people at hg-fast-export and at the hg-git plugin, and extended the deadline once. By any reasonable standard they handled it well. Repositories still vanished on a specific Wednesday, including a great many belonging to people who had stopped reading email about a side project years before.

Mercurial hosting survived, mostly on Heptapod, a GitLab fork maintained by Octobus with funding from people who genuinely needed it. Meta kept its own Mercurial derivative running at a scale Git could not handle and open sourced it as Sapling in November 2022. The tool is alive. What died on 1 July 2020 was discoverability, which for a piece of developer infrastructure is close enough to the same thing.

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