I have migrated all my source-code repositories from Mercurial to Git. This means that they can now be mirrored on both Bitbucket as well as GitHub. It was not a very happy choice, but some times you just have to set aside your preferences and move on in life.
Beyond being very happy that we now have free and good-quality DVCS
tools like Mercurial and Git (as well as free source-code
hosting-providers for these like Bitbucket
and GitHub respectively), I have never spent
too much time and effort on VCS
tools, considering them as tools (albeit important tools) to get a job done.
To the extent that I did, I preferred the simplicity of Mercurial to the
apparent complexity of Git (actually the command-line interfaces of the
hg and git programs, respectively). I could easily
memorize (or guess) the commands needed for Mercurial for day-to-day use,
while Git seemed to constantly require looking up the relevant commands on-line
and a hope that I have not screwed things up. It was also nice to see Mercurial
(and Bitbucket) users quietly using their tool to actually develop software and
quite off-putting to see Git (and GitHub) users constantly proselytize to (and
putting down) users of other VCS tools. That is why I chose to use Mercurial to manage all my source-code repositories.
Unfortunately however, it is quite difficult to avoid Git (and GitHub) these
days - more and more developers start their projects in Git (and on GitHub) and
even those using Mercurial (and Bitbucket) earlier seem to have started
converting their repositories to Git (for example, the Go
project and even
Python). Since I can't avoid learning Git (and using GitHub) and since it
isn't actually that bad compared to Mercurial (in fact, the underlying
concepts in Git are remarkably simple and consistent, while the
git tool is incredibly fast; it also makes working with branches
unbelievably simple and fast), I decided to just stick to Git. It also allows
me to use both Bitbucket and GitHub for hosting my source-code repositories.
Fortunately the hg-git
Mercurial plug-in makes this transition quite painless. You first install
Dulwich and hg-git.
Then you execute something like the following for each of your Mercurial
repositories:
# Create an empty Git repository. $ mkdir -p /path/to/git_repo $ cd /path/to/git_repo $ git init # Export the Mercurial repository to the Git repository. $ cd /path/to/hg_repo $ hg bookmark hg $ hg push /path/to/git_repo # Finish the migration in the Git repository. $ cd /path/to/git_repo $ git checkout -b master hg $ git branch -d hg $ git tag -a git-conv -m "Converted to Git."
Before pushing this to Bitbucket, rename your existing Mercurial repository (say “MyProject” to “MyProject_Hg”) to create a back-up and create a Git repository with the original name (i.e. “MyProject”). On GitHub create a Git repository with the same name. Now you execute something like the following:
# Add the Bitbucket and GitHub Git remotes. $ git remote add origin ssh://git@bitbucket.org/username/myproject.git $ git remote set-url origin --add ssh://git@github.com/username/MyProject.git # Push the Git repository to Bitbucket and GitHub. $ git push -u origin master $ git push origin git-conv
That was it - that was all I needed to migrate my Mercurial repositories to
Git and to host them on Bitbucket and GitHub. See the hg-git and
git documentation for the details. The freely-available book
“Pro Git” provides an
excellent introduction to Git (as well as its internals).
Farewell Mercurial, I will now be using Git. You were a great tool to work with, but the world is just not a fair place.