Gazebo has long used mercurial, but now that bitbucket has announced it will be removing it i’m wondering if gazebo will switch? I think using mercurial makes external contributions harder since git is so much more popular. Personally i’m in favor of a switch to git.
1 Like
Thanks for asking. We are currently evaluating our options, which includes switching to git, but we haven’t decided yet. We will keep the community updated on our plan and discuss how to migrate when the time comes.
for git, given better outreach. Although it would be nice to get an update on what options are being evaluated. Will there be a time/place for the community to comment on potential migration strategies?
We did an internal evaluation of options, where the options included staying at bitbucket (but switching to git), moving to github, or moving to gitlab. Our internal discussions concluded that github would be a good place to move our repositories.
I’ll withhold our github rationale for now in order to elicit unbiased comments. I’d be interested to know what preferences and opinions you and others have on this subject.
2 Likes
+1 for git. mercurial has brought me many headaches with branch tips and other weird stuff. Github would of course make it the easiest to collaborate with ROS community.
I think this change will be welcome by almost anyone interested in contributing! My fun fact about version control systems has always been “did you know Gazebo uses mercurial on bitbucket?” and never has anyone responded with “oh I prefer that to git, and I prefer bitbucket”.
1 Like
One logistical question – will you be able to transfer issues?
There are some tools for transferring issues, and we aim to do so.
I think GitHub is better considering Microsoft has been bringing a lot of improvements to GitHub recently. Microsoft recently announced the it will be preserving all GitHub code bases in a code vault. See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzI9FNjXQ0o
Considering that we should migrate to GitHub asap.
any updates on this?
this topic is very important but somehow it seems to have stagnated.
my opinion is the same as everyone here which is that switching to github would be much more productive and since time is running out with bitbucket slowly removing mercurial features from their platform, a decision by the core team should come soon.
The decision has been made several months ago, we’re moving to GitHub. Sorry if this hasn’t been clear.
We’ve stopped creating new repositories on BitBucket since their announcement. For example, all the latest repositories with release metadata for Ignition have been added to the Ignition Robotics - release repositories · GitHub organization. Some smaller repositories with no issues or pull requests have already been migrated to Open Robotics · GitHub.
For the largest repositories, we’ve been testing various tools so that we can publicly store all their metadata, including issues, pull requests, commit hashes, comments, and so on.
We should have a concrete migration plan to present to the community in the coming month.
3 Likes
That’s awesome!
Thanks 
See the full migration plan here: [Important] Gazebo and Ignition are going to GitHub!