A while back now Bitbucket informed me that Mercurial repositories are no longer supported and will be disabled as of Summer of 2020. In my mind of a software developer a repository is just where the source code is kept, so given that Stone Steps Webalizer is now mostly in maintenance mode, I decided to let the Mercurial repository be disabled at Bitbucket and use it just for issue tracking, Wiki and downloads. Soon I learned that Bitbucket and I have different definitions of what a repository means.

When I visited my project page in September, all I saw is an empty page saying that Mercurial repositories are no longer supported.

https://bitbucket.org/StoneStepsInc/stonestepswebalizer/

Everything was gone - Wiki, issues, discussions and downloads. I wasn't concerned about Wiki - it was maintained in a Mercurial repository and I kept a copy of it on my computer. However, I was surprised to see that images were not kept as attachments in the repository and instead were stored in the Bitbucket cloud and were still accessible. I guess some bugs are better than others, so I saved those images, which was helpful.

All issues and discussions, however, were gone and it's sad that Bitbucket would stomp like this on years of work without even trying to create some kind of a data dump, like most companies do. Granted, I could be more diligent at trying to export my content, but still my trust in Bitbucket was gone.

Updated 2020-12-25

A small follow up story how I recovered issues.

I started looking for an alternative repository hosting service and didn't want to have anything to do with Bitbucket, so I explored GitHub and Azure DevOps. GitHub was a great one-stop solution with a repository, issue tracking, project boards and release management. Azure DevOps was a much heavier platform, but had some features that I wanted to explore professionally, so I opted for Azure DevOps and moved Stone Steps Webalizer there:

https://dev.azure.com/StoneSteps/Stone%20Steps%20Webalizer

After setting everything up, I learned that Azure DevOps is not very public-friendly in terms of reporting issues. Even registered Microsoft users cannot create issues in a public project until they are added as project users. So, I ended up using them both - Azure DevOps for build pipelines, Wiki and agile boards, and GitHub as a repository, issue tracker and release download location. Here is the GitHub project.

https://github.com/StoneStepsInc/StoneStepsWebalizer

Please keep in mind that the project now is in maintenance mode and it may take time for me to look into new issues.

Today I finished setting up everything and will see how it is going. So far I am quite impressed with Azure DevOps and the versatility of their platform and with how well GitHub is set up for Open Source projects. See you there... and there.