The Stochastic Game

Earlier this week, Bitbucket announced its plan for killing Mercurial support by next year. This doesn’t come as a shock to anybody who has been a Bitbucket/Mercurial user, since Atlassian’s investment in Mercurial had been declining for the past few years. So I think their reasons for taking this decision are a bit ironic in addition to being shortsighted: Building quality features requires intense focus, and supporting two version control systems means splitting focus – doubling shipping time and technical overhead.

The cat was never really in the bag, since all the conversations around this, and the code written for it, were all publicly availble on sr.ht’s code hosting, developer mailing list, and IRC channel (#srht on Freenode), but I’m happy to, at last, officially say that I’ve been working on sourcehut for the past few months, adding support for Mercurial hosting. You can find all the relevant details in Drew DeVault’s annoucement (Drew is the principal developer on sourcehut).