Goodbye, Bitbucket!

[Tuxman]

After years of making me sufficiently happy, my favorite project hosting platform declared yesterday that they'll phase out Mercurial support next year because "everyone uses Git. come to the dark side hurr durr".

I'll move all of my projects over to Darcshub (the smaller ones) and probably somewhere else (the larger ones) before the deadline. Expect surprising updates in some of my threads. Still, it's kind of a "self-fulfilling prophecy" in my opinion: Take away Mercurial support, spend all of your marketing money to promote Git - and then claim that nobody seems to use Mercurial anyway. Oh geez.

 

[Lintalist]

How about https://pijul.org/ (haven't tried it, just sounds interesting just as Darcshub)

[Tuxman]

I had registered an account at the Pijul Nest when I first read about it, but I'll wait until the blinking "beta quality" text is removed ...
Technically, it sounds like an adequate "modern Darcs".

[wraith808]

For a second there, you had me worried. I thought they'd done something controversial 

[Lintalist]

Well you could use mercurial locally and Pijul for the public, just to make it needlessly complex

Re mercurial, Sourcehut - not free but cheap - also bitbucket migration script https://lists.sr.ht/...2BDVECCN%40koishi%3E

[Tuxman]

Ahh, Sourcehut. Why do I keep forgetting that?

[Deozaan]

Bummer.

I keep trying to learn how to use git because it seems like all service providers only support git and I want to take advantage of some of the cool features these services provide. But for one reason or another I get frustrated with git and give up and go back to mercurial.



And if I am going to convert all my repositories to git, then I might as well migrate everything over to GitHub. Bitbucket has no advantage over and is less supported than GitHub for git repositories.

[Tuxman]

Just looked at Sourcehut again. A lot of "this is beta" and "actually, this is run by one person" yet. I'll keep an eye on it this time!

[Deozaan]

RhodeCode looks like it might be nice for a self-hosted solution.

[Deozaan]

GitHub supports importing/converting mercurial (and other) repositories:

https://github.com/new/import


And here's a python based tool that will migrate Bitbucket issues to GitHub:

https://github.com/j...cket-issue-migration

[Tuxman]

I try to stay the hell away from Git, but I found out that GitHub supports SVN clients, so I might bookmark that for later...
Thank you, Deozaan.

[Deozaan]

Thank you, Deozaan.

-Tuxman (August 21, 2019, 05:48 PM)

Credit goes to the other complainers/commenters on the official Bitbucket "sunsetting mercurial" thread.

[Shades]

I keep trying to learn how to use git because it seems like all service providers only support git and I want to take advantage of some of the cool features these services provide. But for one reason or another I get frustrated with git and give up and go back to mercurial.

-Deozaan (August 21, 2019, 04:44 PM)

(G)It doesn't get simpler than with the NitroGit client (not free), although there doesn't seem to be a time limit to their evaluation version. It has a different look than any other application and it would be understandable if that isn't your "thing". But it is simple to use.

Never got into SVN after several attempts, Mercurial I have never tried. There wasn't much time for it as I was bound to CVS (yes, that old beast). But there is talk to convert/upgrade the very active but also almost 20 year CVS repo to Git/GitLab. That will be fun...

Ah well, Git cannot be worse than CVS. The last freely available version of that software is from 2005, the WinCVS client is also from that year and has been stagnant for almost 14 years. Mercurial came and practically went in that time... That puts things in perspective 

[Jibz]

There is much to like about sourcehut, the only thing that keeps me from using it at the moment is that patches are handled through email instead of having a web interface for pull requests.

I converted the remaining 5-6 mercurial repos I had on bitbucket to git yesterday.

[Tuxman]

CVS is nice because of its low overhead. OpenBSD will probably migrate to their own "got" soon which is a NIH alternative to Git, effectively ending work on the last remaining CVS client.

Time for SCCS... 
http://sccs.sourceforge.net/

[Tuxman]

P.S.:

I'll move all of my projects over to Darcshub (the smaller ones) and probably somewhere else (the larger ones) before the deadline.

-Tuxman (August 21, 2019, 02:44 PM)

Let's talk about the "somewhere else" for a while, crossing out Darcshub which is currently unsurpassed for what it does.

The main reasons why I keep (soon: kept) some of my projects on Bitbucket and, partially, GitHub were pure egoism:

• Those services provide(d) a low entry barrier for potential collaborators. Not that my projects had attracted actual collaborators, except for this one. It was really easy to find my code.
  
• Self-hosting something like Kallithea, GitLab or RhodeCode would have required quite some effort, those services usually have a lot of dependencies. Also, data loss would be much more likely on one of my servers than on theirs.
  
• Running a bare VCS like CVS or SVN on my servers would have almost no advantage over just throwing everything on Darcshub, minus a good (here: contributor-friendly) web interface.

Shuffling through my collected notes again, I found out that the newest version (2.9) of Fossil, SQLite's homegrown version control system, comes with an automatic GitHub mirror export function. In theory, this is a perfect solution:

• Running Fossil servers is not really resource-consuming.
• Making a backup of a Fossil repository is done by copying exactly one file.
• Contributing would be easy and I would still have easily discoverable repositories.

In practice, I tested the documented two-step method to make an existing GitHub repository a Fossil repository which is then automatically (one-way) synchronized with GitHub on one of my less popular projects. Although the result came out almost as expected, I found a couple of obvious bugs on Windows, including one that prevents Git converstion from inside the PowerShell. This is bad, as Windows is still my main development OS. I wrote a lengthy bug report into their forums (which seems to be in a moderation queue or something), probably it will be awesome soon.

I have a few months left to decide ... 

-----------------------------------

(Of course, I also tried to try SCCS. Does not seem to work well on non-Solaris systems just yet. I posted to their mailing list, maybe I can help.)

[Shades]

Did find some projects on Sourceforge, I think, that were supposed to enable web access to CVS repositories. Also abandoned, just as the client. Whatever was there, I could never make it work. In the version of Jira (issue tracker) that I have running there is functionality to hook CVS up to it. That way it should be possible to have a list of changed files per issue tracked, the CVS comment, the amount of changes inside each file and links to a web interface that shows the actual files and their changes.

Getting the file list overview was not a problem, the amount of changes and CVS comment are also correctly displayed, but never got the web interface where the actual changes could be seen to run.

SCCS originated in 1972!?!? And here I was thinking that CVS was old and feeble...

It has been decided though that GitLab (on a dedicated server) must be used as replacement for the CVS repo.

Been taking a look at this 'Fossil'. Looks interesting enough and likely suffices for a one-man shop or a very small team (caveat: I have been spoiled with am used to Jira). Thanks for that one, though.

[Deozaan]

• Self-hosting something like Kallithea, GitLab or RhodeCode would have required quite some effort, those services usually have a lot of dependencies. Also, data loss would be much more likely on one of my servers than on theirs.

-Tuxman (August 23, 2019, 08:33 PM)

I just finished installing RhodeCode on one of my machines, and importing all 40 of my Bitbucket repositories into it.

It wasn't very painful or hard to configure or anything. I did "sudo apt install hg" just in case that was needed, then ran the installer and it was up and running a few minutes later. It's just been time consuming having to import my repositories from Bitbucket one by one, and of course doing some experimentation/exploration trying to familiarize myself with the new software/front end. And I guess I'm still not completely finished switching everything over, because I still have to update all my local repositories to point to the new location(s).

But yeah, I am also more concerned about the increased risk of data loss, since the machine I set it up on is in the same building as my primary coding PC. All it would take is a single house fire, and poof, it's all gone up in smoke.

Time to petition mouser to host something like Kallithea or RhodeCode on the DC servers for our benefit!

[Tuxman]

SCCS originated in 1972!?!? And here I was thinking that CVS was old and feeble...

-Shades (August 23, 2019, 10:43 PM)

It does one thing well - on the limited set of supported platforms...  version control is not necessarily a huge task.

Been taking a look at this 'Fossil'. Looks interesting enough and likely suffices for a one-man shop or a very small team (caveat: I have been spoiled with am used to Jira). Thanks for that one, though.

-Shades (August 23, 2019, 10:43 PM)

Jira is expensive, but it is my favorite bug tracking system indeed. I like it when I see projects using it, like Vivaldi does. However, I can't trust Atlassian anymore. (And I don't need most of Jira's features. My projects usually are "one-man-shows". )

I just finished installing RhodeCode on one of my machines, and importing all 40 of my Bitbucket repositories into it.

It wasn't very painful or hard to configure or anything.

-Deozaan (August 24, 2019, 03:43 AM)

Gathered from looking at the website for a minute:

• Their website menu doesn't work well on Safari. Hard enough to find some information...
• The FreeBSD port is unmaintained.
• RhodeCode is based on Python 2 which will EOL soon. Python 2 also comes with a huge lot of dependencies.

Sure: It is bearable. But it would not beat Fossil... unless I'd absolutely want to stay with Mercurial. And the past few years have shown that it does not matter at all. People don't come to my projects anyway. 

[Lintalist]

Before I forget - re selfhosting: SCM-Manager - share and manage your Git, Mercurial and Subversion repositories over http

• Very easy installation
• No need to hack configuration files, SCM-Manager is completely configureable from its Web-Interface
• No Apache and no database installation is required
• Central user, group and permission management
• Out of the box support for Git, Mercurial and Subversion
• Full RESTFul Web Service API (JSON and XML)
• Rich User Interface
• Simple Plugin API
• Useful plugins available (f.e. Ldap-, ActiveDirectory-, PAM-Authentication)
• Licensed under the BSD-License

https://www.scm-manager.org/

[Tuxman]

There is no "the BSD license". Also, it is based on... Java? 

[Lintalist]

Java indeed - I just checked which version I tried a few years ago - v1.36 - it worked well locally but in the end I didn't need it to have something like this - I remembered just now I had it. It is/was indeed very easy to setup - just start "scm-server.bat" and its up.

https://bitbucket.or.../default/LICENSE.txt (the source is on bitbucket, the irony)

Gittea is also very easy and cross platform but it is GIT of course https://try.gitea.io/

I just read that there are people working on mercurial + gitlab as a fork, discussion with links and presentation https://gitlab.com/g...tlab-ce/issues/31600

[Tuxman]

That Heptapod looks interesting, but it confuses the hell out of me that they use "CVS" when they mean "VCS". 

[Deozaan]

Due to the concerns over local data loss, I looked further into Sourcehut and created an account. Technically it is donationware or at the very least a free alpha as payments are optional. More details about that can be found here:

https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/

I also like that one of their goals before it is considered feature-complete (and ready to promote from alpha to beta) is to allow "data freedom, including importing and exporting all of your account data."

That Heptapod looks interesting, but it confuses the hell out of me that they use "CVS" when they mean "VCS". 

-Tuxman (August 24, 2019, 06:37 AM)

Yes, that's another one that I've looked into. Looks interesting indeed.

[wraith808]

There is no "the BSD license". Also, it is based on... Java? 

-Tuxman (August 24, 2019, 06:04 AM)

One would assume from the phrasing that they mean the original BSD License, but it would be good to check with them.