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ECWolf migrated to Git 2019-09-09 00:09:38

Following the news that Bitbucket will drop Mercurial support in 2020, I have migrated the repositories to Git. Just in case they're needed for historical reference, the old Mercurial repositories will remain with their "-hg" suffix until they're automatically deleted. Ultimately nothing should be lost since the hg-git conversion is generally pretty solid (Zandronum has been using it to sync with GZDoom), and I even wrote a script to migrate the subrepositories.

In the end this will likely be a good thing for the project since as much as I loved using Mercurial, the reality is that Git is what everyone knows and bad translation between Git and Hg has been a bit of a thorn in my side when it came to pull requests (Hg branches are not the same as Git branches). That's even putting aside the fact that Bitbucket's Mercurial support has been somewhat eroding since they added support for Git many years back. Having to no longer deal with feature omissions will be nice for me at least.

Still, I'm going to miss TortoiseHg and subrepo support that works like an end user actually expects. For the former there are a number of GUIs for Git, but so far I haven't found one that doesn't annoy me in some way. Usually the problem is that they focus on stuff that's easy to do on the command line and don't solve the problem I'm actually trying to solve which is browsing changes across history. For the latter Git has submodules, but for whatever reason they never just update the way that the user expects and require a bit of confusing manual intervention at some point or another. I guess the flip side of the way Mercurial does it is now the Hg repos are kind of hard to check out since the subrepos aren't in the location it expects them to be and errors out completely.

Already had a few people ask me why not switch to another host or self host? Essentially Mercurial is losing its equivalent to GitHub, and without it I don't have much hope for the platform to continue thriving. There are a few sites that are trying to cater to those who wish to continue using Mercurial, but I haven't seen one that will have the same "everyone can use it for free" policy that's somewhat essential these days for welcoming new programmers. Self hosting produces a similar problem, but now submitting patches becomes emailing patches. Sure it's decentralized that way, but in my experience most people are resistant to using email these days.

Then the question becomes "why even stick with Bitbucket?" Honestly I'm not sure there are any particularly great reasons, but the two that keep me inclined to stay are that I like how they have an organization feature for repos. Unlike GitHub where, yes you can have a team account, but within that team it's still a flat list ordered by modification time. Additionally, I was using their issue tracker for ECWolf and I was able to keep that by staying there. There is the downside in that GitHub is more popular, but I don't think having an Atlassian account (or sending an email) is that big of a hurdle for people to contribute.

 

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