BitBucket is abandonning Mercurial

[Ybalrid]

Hello guys,

I don't know if it's the best place to talk about that, but since it seems that Ogre 1.x developement happen mostly on GitHub, and only the 2.x branch is actively worked on BitBucket, it seemed more relevent.

Atlassian just sent the following email

Atlassian

After much consideration, we've decided to remove Mercurial support from Bitbucket Cloud and the API. Mercurial features and repositories will be officially removed from Bitbucket and its API on June 1, 2020.
What used to be a very fragmented version control software market has rapidly matured. Mercurial usage on Bitbucket is steadily declining, and the percentage of new Bitbucket users choosing Mercurial has fallen to less than 1%. At the same time, Git has become the standard. According to a Stack Overflow Developer Survey, almost 90% of developers use Git, while Mercurial is the least popular version control system with only about 3% developer adoption.
Given that Git has emerged as the version control system of choice for the industry, we have decided to focus our priorities and roadmap on building the best possible experience for the market and our users.

https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-m ... 1343403396

By June 2020 they will definitively remove all Mercurial repositories from the platform. We probably need to find a new home for Ogre development. I know some of the maintainers (notably Matias) seems to really prefer hg over git. (And we are not the only OSS project that perfer it over Git, an excelent example is the SDL library.)

I am curious to know what are your thoughts about this? This is mostly a matter and a decision that concern the main maintainers of Ogre, but I think it affects everybody anyway, notably the contribution and pull request workflow...

[dark_sylinc]

News travel fast.

We haven't discussed much but given that 1.x branch is already working in git, on Github... you can already guess where this is going.

Personally, I preferred Mercurial. I find TortoiseHg much user friendly and productive to use. But I do miss the features that Github provides (its ticket system is amazing, the way you can reference commits to/from tickets is fluid unlike JIRA, there's a lot of 3rd party integration for CI, and for automated pull requests, it's also far more popular: users contribute a lot more to projects on GH). I've had some pressure from another OSS project lead to move to Github given its user popularity, but I stayed with Bitbucket due to Mercurial.

I had discussed with Pavel in different ways to synchronize our git and mercurial mirrors so that I could still use Mercurial while git was always up to date and PRs & tickets would come from Github, but we had disagreements as my workflow wasn't compatible with his workflow and tools. Thus we didn't discuss it further until those problems were addressed.

But if Bitbuckets removes Mercurial repos, thus making Mercurial the source of significant problems for users to access the 2.x branches (and for me to push my changes)... that's a different deal. If I insisted on Mercurial I'd be throwing a tantrum. Sure I don't like it, but I'm not an idiot to impose something nobody else wants.
If we abandon Mercurial repos entirely, I can use my hg-git tools directly with the git repo in a way that have little conflict with Pavel's flow (still needs further research), thus it is very likely we all end up in the ogreCAVE mirror.

Basically my reasoning boils down to this:

1. The main (only?) reason to use git is Github and its ecosystem
2. The only reason to use Bitbucket is Mercurial

Take Mercurial away from Bitbucket, and I have no reason to stay on that platform.

It's a shame Mercurial lost the popularity contest. Facebook uses Mercurial, Google uses Mercurial (and git), SDL2 uses Mercurial, a lot of gamedevs hate git.

But on the other hand I'm relieved. Now I don't have to make the every-day struggling choice of git (popular) vs hg (good), somebody else has done it for me.

These news are very recent so I still have to make some tests my tools don't interrupt Pavel's too much, and that he is ok with it. But it all looks like we'll migrate everything into ogreCAVE's mirror.

[Ybalrid]

Well, there's still 10 months to figure out the workflow and such.

There are probably other hosting options for Mercurial too if that really benefit you... I don't know how the website and the forums are hosted, but there's always the solution of installing a Phabricator instance. This is the solution of choice for some bit OSS projects like MediaWiki or Blender...

It just require a Linux box running PHP, MySQL(or Mariadb), and the web server/php being able to execute the git and hg binaries. It can host repositories, has the same kind of ticketing systems you like on GitHub, kanban boards, wikis, code review tools, pull request system, etc... It's a full "software engineering platform". It can do a lot of stuff, maybe even too much, it's a bit crazy...

It was originally internally developed and used by Facebook. But authors decided to quit and run a company based on developing and supporting it. I played around with it, it's powerful, but may help Ogre self host it's repository while having a good management of tickets and tasks and bugs and everything.

The problem is :

- this is a thing that needs to be installed, configured and maintained by somebody
- this would require everybody to change it's workflow. Thus being way more "friction" for the community and the developers than "just using GitHub"

I'm just throwing an idea in the air ^^"

[dark_sylinc]

The problem is :

- this is a thing that needs to be installed, configured and maintained by somebody
- this would require everybody to change it's workflow. Thus being way more "friction" for the community and the developers than "just using GitHub"

Exactly. I don't want to have to think about version control. It should just work and be somebody else's problem.
And it should "just work" for our users too.

We don't have the resources to maintain our own server either.

The other hosting options are too obscure for our contributors, so if I have to weight in everything, Github is the clear winner by a big margin.

[hyyou]

With hg declining, it is time for me to play git tutorial: https://learngitbranching.js.org/

[chchwy]

Is there any plan for migrating repos? I think it includes not only the Ogre engine also the dependencies.

[mrmclovin]

This is good news for me at least, since now I might be able to contribute a bit (If GitHub is chosen). I was using Mercurial too infrequently and I forgot how it worked each time I wanted to submit my small patches, so I didn't bother.

Anyway, I hope Ogre's Mercurial users will hate Git less and not more after the change...

[Crashy]

As Dark Sylinc, I love Tortoise Hg a lot, best versioning frontend to me.

I guess I'm gonna setup a dedicated mercurial server to host my personal projects, as I did with svn a few years ago.

[Zonder]

As Dark Sylinc, I love Tortoise Hg a lot, best versioning frontend to me.

I guess I'm gonna setup a dedicated mercurial server to host my personal projects, as I did with svn a few years ago.

I think source forge still has mecurial.

But ogre I think should move to github. Wouldn't it be better to get https://github.com/ogre3d to give the name up though!

[Ybalrid]

But ogre I think should move to github. Wouldn't it be better to get https://github.com/ogre3d to give the name up though!

Somebody that's officially part of the Ogre development team (Pavel or Matias?) could ask Éloi Rivard (azmeuk) to release this organization.

"OgreCave" is a really strange name to be honest, and when somebody talk to me about a cave, I picture this in my mind:

(So, that's sounds like the name of a VR system using Ogre, that would be really cool, but it's not what it says on the tin... )

[TaaTT4]

As the latest OGRE news says, OGRE repository has been splitted (between 1.x and 2.x version) as well as finally moved to Github.
Since I'm in a situation that I suppose is familiar to many of you (at least to everyone that has submitter a pull request in the past), I'm looking for help about workflow/tools to migrate my OGRE fork from Bitbucket+Mercurial to Github+Git.

[Ybalrid]

The splitting was bound to happen, It was already quite impossible to imaging merging the 1.x and 2.x branches years ago

I am loosely aware of tools that permit to import/export hg commit to a git repository, but I definitively need to work on that.

Thankfully, I'm not depending on a fork of Ogre on any project, just the upstream. and the only fork I have is that pull request to fix the examples because I'm a stupid French Linux user with a stupid French keyboard and the examples are using SDL keycodes instead of scancodes

[dark_sylinc]

As the latest OGRE news says, OGRE repository has been splitted (between 1.x and 2.x version) as well as finally moved to Github.
Since I'm in a situation that I suppose is familiar to many of you (at least to everyone that has submitter a pull request in the past), I'm looking for help about workflow/tools to migrate my OGRE fork from Bitbucket+Mercurial to Github+Git.

I just posted: Migrating repos from Mercurial to git

Let me know if it helps you.

[dark_sylinc]

Thankfully, I'm not depending on a fork of Ogre on any project, just the upstream. and the only fork I have is that pull request to fix the examples because I'm a stupid French Linux user with a stupid French keyboard and the examples are using SDL keycodes instead of scancodes

Am I asking too much if I ask you to submit your PR via github. I want to test the workflow, and I want to merge your changes, I treat regionalization bugs very seriously.

[Ybalrid]

Thankfully, I'm not depending on a fork of Ogre on any project, just the upstream. and the only fork I have is that pull request to fix the examples because I'm a stupid French Linux user with a stupid French keyboard and the examples are using SDL keycodes instead of scancodes

Am I asking too much if I ask you to submit your PR via github. I want to test the workflow, and I want to merge your changes, I treat regionalization bugs very seriously.

Happy to serve as a guinea pig!
You know me, I already forked the ogre-next repo thinking about submiting that same PR, I still need to clone it, apply my changes on it, commit, and I get back to you

Edit: @dark_sylinc please look at this : https://github.com/OGRECave/ogre-next/pull/18