Farewell Mercurial

My first love when it comes to distributed source control systems was Mercurial. It was powerful, simple, and it had excellent Windows client. Compared to Source Safe and CVS I was using before, it was a heaven.

While I first dabbled with local repositories, it wasn’t too long until I found BitBucket. As it was free for up to five users it seemed like a perfect home for many of my projects - both public and private. Yes, Git was getting popular at the same time but I preferred Mercurial. However, as more and more people started using Git, I switched.

Even when I switched to Git, I still continued keeping some projects on BitBucket - especially those where I collaborated with other users. It was simply much easier to get them used to TortoiseHg than to Git. For inexperienced user there was a real benefit in all restrictions Mercurial had by default.

Unfortunately, less than a year from now BitBucket will kill off Mercurial support.

I fully understand them. There was simply not enough Mercurial users out there to make it work. Even when I look at my own repositories, Mercurial is only a small fraction of my commits. However, I am still sad to see an old friend gone.

My guess I’ll convert most of my remaining repositories to Git. Considering how integrated Git got over the years with other tools, I am sure quite a few of shared repositories will go Git route too. For rest, I guess I’ll need to find another home.