m. c. de marco: To invent new life and new civilizations...

In a surprise bid for an Olympic gold in foot-shooting, Bitbucket, the GitHub of Mercurial users, announced back in August that it was “deprecating” Mercurial in favor of Git. Even though the company was founded for the sole purpose of being a GitHub for Mercurial users, they decided to become a GitHub for Git users. Even though there is already a GitHub for Git users.

If that were all they were doing, they wouldn’t be in the foot-shooting Olympics. However, by “deprecate”, Atlassian (the current owners of Bitbucket) actually means “erase people’s public repositories from the Internet.” They had one job, safely storing other people’s code repositories, and instead they’re deleting them. (The original deletion date was June 1st, but due to coronavirus, deletion is being delayed until July 1st.)

If that were all they were doing, they still might not be in the foot-shooting Olympics. You might think, because it’s easy enough to migrate between Mercurial and Git, that they would provide a little button that says “migrate my repository to Git instead of deleting it.” After all, GitHub has a little “migrate my repository from Mercurial on Bitbucket to Git on GitHub” button, and it works just fine. (I know; I’ve pressed it several times already and have plans to press it some more.) You would think that a company that wants to be GitHub would include this basic GitHub functionality that GitHub has targeted at its own users, but no. Feet must be shot instead.

There is a long, long thread at the Atlassian forums about just how pissed people are at Bitbucket and Atlassian right now, how if they’re going to be forced to use Git they’ll use it at GitHub or GitLab rather than at Bitbucket, how you may think Mercurial is a hobbyist thing but they’ll never trust Atlassian for business or pleasure again, how Bitbucket had one job, etc., etc. It’s fairly entertaining if you’re into that sort of thing, and worth a read through when you’re giving your “migrate to GitHub” button-pushing finger a break between erstwhile Bitbucket repositories.

This post filed under how I’m spending my coronavirus vacation.