I've been using Bitbucket with Mercurial repositories since 2011, both for private and public repos. I can count more than 50 mercurial repos that I'll need to manually move somewhere else. I'm really disappointed right now. I can understand their motives but they need to provide a single click method to at least convert a repo to git (this is a MUST IMHO).
I love mercurial but also can see that the community is shrinking, mercurial still relies on Python 2.7, and we are approaching to the EOL of Python 2.7. TortoiseHG also suffers from this, and the release cycle is always out of sync with the hg releases, and this breaks thg. These little things shows the sad state of mercurial, and in the end, this will drive most of the developers away from using it.
I guess it was great while it lasted... now, Bitbucket, please provide the developers the right tools to move away from mercurial with celerity.
Hg already works with Python 3, and tortoisehg's Python 3 development is proceeding at a rapid pace. They're not dead, they just left it to the last minute, relatively speaking. I expect them both to make the cutoff of Python 2 EOL with stable releases.
The releases being out of sync is not great, but if you're on Windows you download tortoisehg with a compatible hg, and if you're not your distro's repositories should ensure they don't push a new hg to you before tortoisehg is updated. I went and looked at the history, and the average delay from a mercurial release to the corresponding tortoisehg is only about 3 weeks. Not a big deal. On Arch Linux since tortoisehg isn't in the repos it's a slight pain to hold back mercurial. Hopefully after the Python 3 transition tortoisehg makes it into the repos.
...though if there is not mercurial hosting available by the time bitbucket sunsets support, then maybe I won't care. I really want to keep using mercurial for my public open-source projects.
I didn't know that Hg already works with Python 3, that's great! The problem is that most distributions still will distribute the Python 2.7 version, I guess it makes sense until TortoiseHG catches up with Mercurial. I hope this happens soon, but I think that I'm going to switch to Git for the convenience of using GitHub over the other solutions (for open source projects the visibility is a good plus, for private projects I think GitLab is on par on features).
> I went and looked at the history, and the average delay from a mercurial release to the corresponding tortoisehg is only about 3 weeks.
3 weeks for me is a lot of time, that's at least 3 weeks I can't use TortoiseHg, something I use on a daily basis. Anyway, since this happened several times now I manually update hg and thg to avoid this problem (but it's a PITA). I know this is a problem with the distributor and not from the Hg or Thg devs, but still it's a common problem that could be coordinated between the two projects. I actually started using Mercurial because Thg was way better than the Git GUI tools at the moment, and I think this still applies.
In conclusion, a hope the best for the Mercurial project but I'm afraid this will have a negative impact in the long term.
Yep, wholeheartedly agree that it will have a bad impact. However, to me Git is nothing I would use voluntarily in my spare time as it is so hostile to its users (not to mention the conceptual shortcomings and outright questionable "features"). So for me it will be Mercurial and if that means helping out with Heptapod and/or other projects, so be it.
I love mercurial but also can see that the community is shrinking, mercurial still relies on Python 2.7, and we are approaching to the EOL of Python 2.7. TortoiseHG also suffers from this, and the release cycle is always out of sync with the hg releases, and this breaks thg. These little things shows the sad state of mercurial, and in the end, this will drive most of the developers away from using it.
I guess it was great while it lasted... now, Bitbucket, please provide the developers the right tools to move away from mercurial with celerity.