PCem

I see from https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-bitbucket that Bitbucket will be deleting all Mercurial repositories (presumably including PCem) on June 1, 2020, and will only be supporting Git thereafter. I'm sure Sarah has been totally on top of this, but can anyone say what the plan for this is going to be? Will PCem be moving away from Bitbucket, or staying there but converting away from Mercurial, or what? I'm not too concerned as it's plenty of time and I'm sure there are ways to make the transition relatively painless, but would at least like to ascertain whether we'll still be able to comb through all the old commits the way we can now, as that's of course invaluable for debugging in some cases. Has this been discussed anywhere?

Oh wonderful. I'd missed that announcement. Initial reaction is that switching to Git is probably the least painful move, but I've not really had to give this much thought before now!

Yeah I hadn't noticed either until just now. Methinks there will be some rude awakenings in store for a lot of developers on that day, given how little they're publicizing this...

I agree that switching to Git is likely to be the most palatable way to handle it, but don't have the experience to know what that entails. Whatever the eventual solution, I do hope we'll still be able to browse the commit history post-changeover in much the same way that we can now. Lots of folks are dealing with this so I'm sure there are tools to help, or will be soon, though I'm not sure where to research that off the top of my head.

Oh my. Some very unhappy developers... https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Bitbucket-articles/What-to-do-with-your-Mercurial-repos-when-Bitbucket-sunsets/ba-p/1155380

I don't know why. It's not like BitBucket are going to delete issues, pull requests and wikis. And they're providing an automated tool to convert to a BB git repository. Right? Right? Anyone...?

Oh...

When your competitors (GitHub and others) offers an automated import tool from other VCS's, and you can't even be bothered to offer the same functionality for your own users, talk about showing the middle finger to your users.

If I had any repos I cared about on BB, I'd be moving them.

It's not exactly encouraging is it?

Another option would be to host the repo here. I need to look into how to do that.

Personally, I'd be inclined to move the repo to GitHub, but hey, I'm biased as that is what I use for my own projects. Also never could really figure mercurial out.

But at the end of the day, it's your project, so I'll work with whatever you decide to do.

I like and use Github myself, it has the option to do unlimited private repos on the free tier which the majority of mine are. If you go this route, TBF, aside from the 'general chat' board - pretty much this entire forum could be replaced with their issue tracker for bug reports and pull request system for patches.

Another option is to host your own gitlab from here - https://about.gitlab.com/install/ (for some reason, url tag won't take here)

If you don't want to change the system here, that may be your only option. I've not actually done this myself.

In any case, I think moving to git will pretty much be a thing.

I don't like the whole git pushing either and I use git and Github for my code and I find version control as some complicated suffering with web-based repositories getting random functionality regressions. Dropping a post with a diff here feels comfortable enough

I know years down the line there's going to be another new hot version control that everyone will be urged to migrate to.

leilei wrote: ↑Mon 06 Jan, 2020 9:08 pm I don't like the whole git pushing either and I use git and Github for my code and I find version control as some complicated suffering with web-based repositories getting random functionality regressions. Dropping a post with a diff here feels comfortable enough

I know years down the line there's going to be another new hot version control that everyone will be urged to migrate to.

Always is

At least in most cases, people try to make the migration as 'painless' as possible.

The irony is that I signed on with BitBucket because they supported Mercurial...

leilei wrote: ↑Mon 06 Jan, 2020 9:08 pm I don't like the whole git pushing either and I use git and Github for my code and I find version control as some complicated suffering with web-based repositories getting random functionality regressions. Dropping a post with a diff here feels comfortable enough

This is how I feel as well, I'm definitely in favor of continuing the informal patch contribution system we've got going here on the forum. With Sarah's project management style, it just makes sense.

A. Naim wrote: ↑Mon 06 Jan, 2020 10:58 pm The irony is that I signed on with BitBucket because they supported Mercurial...

That's why a lot of people did! Really dumb move on their part.

I came across this: https://kallithea-scm.org/

Maybe an option for self-hosting?

A large project at my company is faced with this as well. I did some tests converting a Mercurial repo to Git and found there are ample resources online that produced good results. The bigger issue has been the human one of coordinating making the Mercurial repo "read only" while we switch over, at the same time minimising impact to developer productivity.

I would issue a word of caution around self-hosting. I'm not familiar with the culture of the project and this approach might be the best one, and obviously that's fine. However be mindful that server(s) would need to be set up, secured, regularly patched/maintained, etc... In my experience, this isn't as much fun as it sounds, and takes people away from delivering software. Especially when there are several providers that happily provide a good quality service to open source projects for free.

This Bitbucket change might provide a good opportunity to think about would work best for the project obviously in terms of hosting source code, but also issue tracking, release management, build pipelines, code analysis(?), etc... These questions don't all have to be addressed in one hit, but moving to a platform that can provide great features in these areas to an open source project such as this one enables great possibilities for the future.

I just spotted this. Maybe is the alternative they offer...

JIRA is an issue tracker software, not a source repository software.

Might as well bring this issue back to light after the v16 release.

I don't think it's much of a problem. Like Sarah said, either she could host the Mercurial repo herself, or just switch to a Git version system. I do think there are plenty of guides on how to convert a hg repo to a git one, so it doesn't seem it would be too big of a hassle.

Update, I'm in the process of converting the repo to Git. Still undecided about hosting; PCem's web host does provide Git hosting, but I'm not sure how that's going to play with the bandwidth cap.

Or alternatively I can just take the path of least resistance.

https://github.com/sarah-walker-pcem/pcem

SarahWalker wrote: ↑Sat 20 Jun, 2020 4:02 pm Or alternatively I can just take the path of least resistance.

https://github.com/sarah-walker-pcem/pcem

Nice. Path of least resistance is oftentimes the best way.

I also noticed you killed off the issue tracker, probably smart. I use it myself for a 'noteboard' of sorts but am not sure if there's a way to make it read-only.

Are you also migrating to push/pull requests for patches or still using the forum?

Even if i'm on github already, i would still prefer to use the patches subforum to plop a diff here. Not a fan of git and the insisted forkery by design.

Patches subforum isn't going away.