Bazaar Mercurial Plugin to access BitBucket

[David Muir]

On 10/20/2011 10:41 PM, Brendan Simon (eTRIX) wrote:
> On 20/10/11 9:56 PM, bazaar-request at lists.canonical.com wrote:
>> Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:25:08 +0200 From: Jelmer Vernooij
>> <jelmer at samba.org> Hi Brendan, On 10/19/2011 01:25 PM, Brendan Simon
>> (eTRIX) wrote:
>>>> I really like the look and features of BitBucket -- particularly the
>>>> free private repos :)
>>>>
>>>> I really like Bazaar.  I could, and am tempted, to migrate from Bazaar
>>>> to Mecurial, but if Bazaar had a really good Mercurial plugin, then I
>>>> could have the best of both worlds ... no ??
>>>>
>>>> I see that there is a Bazaar HG plugin on Launchpad, but it does not
>>>> seem very mature.  I think there is support for read-only (pull) access,
>>>> and there are plans for write access (push).
>>>>
>>>> Assuming that the HG plugin had read and write support, then I presume
>>>> that means I could use Bazaar to place by personal Bazaar projects on
>>>> BitBucket.
>>>> Does that sound right ??  Sounds cool to me !!
>>>>
>> The bzr-hg plugin does actually have write support these days, although 
>> it is also still pretty experimental. I'm happy to provide help if 
>> you're interested in improving it.
>>
>> BitBucket also supports Git repositories these days, and the bzr-git 
>> plugin is quite stable. Have you considered using a Git repository on 
>> BitBucket and using bzr-git to push to that instead?
> Since BB is inherently focused on Mercurial, it made sense to me to
> either user Mercurial directly, or use Bazaar with Mercurial backend
> (not sure of the pitfalls and I'm sure there would be a few since bzr-hg
> doesn't sound very mature or widely used).
>
> bzr-git might be a more stable option as it sounds like more people
> would be using that.  I will definitely think about that.  Do you need
> to be a git expert to use bzr-git ??  I mean, the beauty of Bazaar (and
> Mercurial ??) is that it is not as complex as git (as git is more for
> coders than non-technical computer users).
>
> The other option is to move to Mercurial for "native" support for BB
> repos, and I presume there is Mercurial-Git plugin for accessing other
> git repos.
>
> So the big question is ..... why use Bazaar instead of Mercurial ??
> Given Bazaar is no where near as widely used, what makes Bazaar so
> different, so much better, that I should stay with Bazaar ??
>
> Pure python was one reason I initially started using Bazaar, but I don't
> think that was a very good reason by itself.  It sounds like Mercurial
> is mainly python, with a small portion in highly portable C (or C++ ??)
> where performance is required/desired.
>
> Thanks,
> Brendan.
>
>

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Mercurial's named branches,
bookmarks, anonymous branches, etc. Finally settled on using named
branches for everything, as the others do a fast forward pull (if it
can) when you try to merge back into default (trunk).

With Bazaar you can uncommit all the way back to the beginning.
Mercurial only lets you undo the last transaction. There are plugins
that let you modify history, but I've found them much harder to use than
Bazaar's `bzr uncommit`.

The biggest downside of Bazaar for me personally is the lack of
integration with NetBeans, which ironically has fairly mediocre support
for Mercurial, even though that's what its developers use. The next
version will finally support branches though, so things are getting better.

In the end it was free private hosting with BitBucket that got us to
switch to Mercurial.

Cheers,
David