Wow, this is awesome (I hope!) news for Jesper and the rest of the bitbucket team. I hope Atlassian treats them well - it should be interesting to see what they do with things.
Integration with Atlassian's tools should be very exciting. For a while now, I've been thinking that Atlassian should try a code hosting service and integrate their code review, code coverage and source exploration tools. Hopefully it works out as well as I imagined it would.
I also want to point out Atlassian likes both Mercurial and Git:
hear hear!
For what is worth, I don't understand why they don't integrate with existing projects as a premium service. Not only bitbucket but github, patch-tag etc.
I don't have too much of a preference between Git and Mercurial, but the lack of even a single free private repository on Githib makes BitBucket a more favorable option for my numerous casual projects.
That helps with the code hosting, but what about a wiki? Bug Tracker? Communicating with other devs? A bitbucket or github repo helps with all of these things too.
You'd have to be pretty casual not to want a bug tracker - even for completely internal, non-public facing, one dev projects they're invaluable for keeping things straight, tracking todos, etc.
That said, I think there's definitely a use case for some sort of bug tracker/wiki which can be embedded in a repository, a'la Fossil. Perhaps flat files rather than SQLite though, so you can track changes in your repository. Not sure how you'd get changes in though, other than via a pull request.
Depends on your project, but you might want at least some level of visibility. If not now, then at some point in the future. Plus, the issue tracker and wiki are currently not versioned or linked to your code, so there's the possibility of them going out of sync.
Many years ago, I wrote a web application that provided this file via a FUSE interface and an online interface you could share with your friends.
Nobody was interested. All the good programmers I know have a simple text file or a mental TODO list. This added too much complexity. On the other hand, all the managers I know want checkboxes and reports and auditing and ..., which made this too simple.
Obviously you don't know me, but the implication that I'm not a "good" programmer because I like some of the features that an issue/task tracker provides over a text file is silly. Jira + Mylyn + Eclipse makes identifying which commits were related to what task just a few clicks away. Likewise I can open a ticket and Eclipse automatically opens all the files I was working with last time I worked on that ticket. If one of my friends wants to help out, I can just assign him a few tickets, and he gets the same benefits, plus I can know what he's working on ATM and what's been completed. Handling customer/client issues in a trackable public way is great, and easy release notes with links to the tickets are way better than cutting/pasting some text todo list.
You could always pay the nominal 6 bucks a month for http://repositoryhosting.com and get unlimited git/svn repos with full trac integration and scheduled encrypted backups.
(not affiliated in any way, just a loyal customer).
This. We routinely have to decide which old repositories we can delete when we want to make a new one, and it's getting old. We don't want to pay $25 more a month just for a few more repositories.
And here I was all set to migrate my projects to Github tonight. I think I'll stick around a bit longer and see what Atlassian can do to improve BitBucket.
On a side note, I paid my monthly subscription fee just a few days ago, but now everyone is on the same (basic, free) plan. Is that money just out the window?
"Because accounts with 5 or fewer users are free, we will be canceling your subscription and moving you to the free plan (you will be notified by PayPal that your Bitbucket account has been canceled)."
Not sure if that means you'll get your money back, though.
You won't, why should you? apart the fact that it probably costs them money to send them back, I for example am just happy that i don't have to pay from now on. Since I have only 2 private collaborators.
I initially decided on HG because I'm a Python developer, and a lot of other people in the Python community seem to recommend it (plus, HG is written in Python). Bitbucket had a free plan with a private repo, so I signed up. About the same time, my employer started migrating from Subversion to Git.
For me, the two features I miss most in HG are the staging area and cheap local branching. There plugins that give you rough equivalents, but I haven't used them and it's much nicer to have what you need out of the box.
Thanks for the tips! MQ and bookmarks look like they could be a solid fill-in for Gits staging area and cheap branching. I'll definitely look more into them.
[I was a co-founder and am a primary developer of Kiln.]
Speaking purely for myself, I don't view Bitbucket as a competitor, to be honest. It's a great tool, but serves a very different purpose.
When it comes to social code, Bitbucket's great. It's Mercurial's equivalent to GitHub, and it fills that role awesomely. I have an account on there where I post stuff I want to be public, including some open-source parts of Kiln's source code, such as our new kbfiles extension.
Kiln, on the other hand, is really focused a lot more on making DVCS a really great experience for companies. A lot of the stuff that makes GitHub and Bitbucket great--the whole social experience--kind of gets in the way of just getting stuff done in a corporate environment. You still want the ability to have personal repos and branches and everything, but you also want really tight integration with bug tracking, really easy ways to follow everything going on with a project in the forms of activity feeds and comprehensive search, APIs to manage everything, a really solid code discussion system so that your developers can talk about code and make sure it's really great before it gets integrated, the ability to quickly answer questions like, "What bugs were open in this point release?" and "Have I contacted customers affected by this to let them know it's fixed?" Kiln and FogBugz together provide those things right now.
I'm sure Bitbucket and Jira could provide that functionality eventually, but it's not what they do right now. And I think that's fine: we need a service that provides really great social tools, and Bitbucket's that. And we need a DVCS hosting solution that's awesome for companies, and Kiln's that. Given that something like 90% of developers still use centralized SCMs, there's piles and piles of room for both of us to coexist peacefully.
I don't believe its that Atlassian tools and products are always 'great', but there aren't many competitors for many of their functions that do anything close. Definitely not on the open source side; And other commercial tools are generally even more terrible.
They aren't great, but they are better than the rest.
Do you use Atlassian tools? We use Confluence and Jira (especially with Greenhopper) on the project I am currently working on. They are not perfect but I would hardly call them abominable.
I currently use JIRA with Greenhopper and Bitbucket. We're currently a team of 15.
My Atlassian experience is only with JIRA as a developer. I'm with mml. The user interface drive me nuts. It gets in the way of me communicating with the team.
The dashboard reports things like time changes. "gry changed the Time Spent to '13920' on FOO-1000" I don't care how many seconds someone spent on an issue. If you have to configure a humane interface, something is wrong.
This is a small example. It takes my locus of attention away from doing what I'm paid to do, write software.
I need to communicate with the team and ask questions in order to get more information to complete an issue. I'm still responsible, yet our workflow requires us to assign the issue to someone in order for the question to be answered, then assigned back. It feels like I'm shuffling tickets rather than communicating around a ticket. The emails sent aren't humane. Don't get me going.
Yet, I can't reply to a JIRA ticket via email as a standard install?
The gist is, after using JIRA daily for seven months, I'm struggling. It feels like the user interface reflects the data model and I don't want to learn it. I get it, it's powerful. But why introduce how complex it is right away? There is no carrot. There's a carrot pile and when you're building velocity, it's not fun to jump over.
I think the problems you are talking about are configuration related.
If you find your workflow requires you to assign an issue for a question to be answered before assigning it back it sounds like a workflow issue, not a problem with the tool.
We use Greenhopper primarily due to having teams located in different states, working on the same project. Having two physical story walls is too hard in this situation and Greenhopper is a nice collaboration tool that solves this problem.
Using JIRA at my place of work I have found the problem that JIRA does not allow multiple people to be assigned to a certain task.
If I want to communicate with a team member and they are not the original reporter or the assigned user they will NEVER see the question posted. There is no good way of notifying a user that they should answer a question on a task without first assigning it to them.
JIRA with greenhopper is absolutely horrible and has caused many hours of frustration in attempting to get the tool to work to our standards and what we need from it.
For my first major corporate project this year I looked into many different Bug tracking tools. Tried many open source, trac, redmine, but nothing was as polished as JIRA. I really enjoy using JIRA (note, 1 user project).
They also seem like an enjoyable company to work for.
They seem to be kind of enterprisey, which kind of makes sense because (a) you can get paid to make enterprisey stuff, and (b) no one likes enterprisey stuff so no one wants to make it without being paid. And usually enterprises ask for terrible features. I just hope Bitbucket doesn't get enterprisey.
I'm a fan of Confluence and JIRA from a user perspective, but oh man, they are terrible products to install and administer.
For instance, we're an Atlassian shop through and through; we also use Fisheye, Crucible and Bamboo. As such, we wanted to tie all of these apps up to Atlassian's SSO solution (Crowd). Take a look at the integration guide for JIRA¹. The process can require finding missing JARs, editing Java property files, commenting and uncommenting forests of XML, and then you're still subject to a bunch of arbitrary restrictions around group membership (super fun when paired with AD). The whole thing feels like an afterthought that was never given the respect of a proper feature.
I personally get the impression that Atlassian's product codebases are pretty fragmented as a result of their grow-via-acquisitions strategy. On the front end, the products are good looking and usable. On the back end, things are a mess. Still, it's my job to run the mess, so I'll keep slogging.
For 3 (or was it 4 or 5?) years, jira users have voted for an enhancement to drive jira groups out of LDAP. The reward for this loyalty? Crowd: a whole new product, with a separate, spendy license. Bizarrely, Confluence is capable of doing this LDAP integration without Crowd. But rather than port that over to Jira and make some users happy, Atlassian decided to take another bite out of their wallets instead.
I actually bought Crowd, out of desperation to solve the problem, but dropped it after a year. Trivially obvious features weren't implemented. It ended up being easier to just script what we needed ourselves.
And don't even get me started on how painful it is to upgrade Atlassian products. shudder
Crowd's LDAP code will hit JIRA trunk the day after 4.2 branches for release. So, good LDAP is coming for both JIRA and Confluence.
Yes, it's years later than it should have, but we are finally getting our house in order on that front.
In the next month or so, we'll also be starting to work on a better installation/upgrade experience for JIRA and Confluence. Would you be interested in chatting about what drives you nuts in the upgrade process? I want to make sure we sort out as many of the problems as possible. doflynn@atlassian.com if you have the time.
I'm just upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1, I shouldn't need to create a new installation, a whole new database, re-download, install, and configure every plugin I use, disable e-mail access, etc...
I want to be able to run an upgrade script, or drop in a new war and when it starts up it asks if I want to upgrade things. Or an inline upgrade. Look at Wordpress, Gallery, MS Office, any OS, etc... for examples.
My startup uses Crowd, Jira, and Confluence. However, due to the complexity and risk (we've had issues crop up in the past) of upgrading, we tend to run several versions behind, waiting until there's some "must have" new feature or improvement.
And while we do use Crowd (and while I generally really like Atlassian products) the Crowd LDAP support is really lacking, and the complexity of hooking Jira/Confluence into Crowd is a pain (no write support for Fedora 389?). It should be a simple flag, maybe even changable from the admin. Not a bunch of hacking in .properties, .xml, and libs.
We've had Crowd deployed for two years to handle web app auth. Configuration, deployment were a bit painful.
We're pulling it out and writing our own - seems to be the only way to get necessary features such as delegated administration which have been on the Crowd roadmap for years now.
The search in confluence is absolutely horrible. What use is a wiki for a 1000+ people company if it's not searchable.
Jira, and maybe this is my companies setup, takes way too many clicks to do simple things like reprioritize tickets. This could just be my preference but I like to treat tickets as an ordered list/stack with the most important at the top.
i've only used jira and confluence, along with a few plugins (the notably awful jira "agile" plugin). over the span of a number of years, myself, and everyone else in the vicinity (at multiple companies) hated it with a passion.
Hated Jira and Confluence? Compared to what? Given that I find Jira to be perhaps the finest issue tracker I've ever worked with (compared to Remedy, Vantive, Scopus, RT, bugzilla and FogBugz), I would genuinely love to hear what tool you think is better than Jira? Particularly now that they can do advanced searching with JQL (Circa 4.x), I don't know of any tool that compares, particularly out of the box.
And, while sharepoint is a little more feature rich, and has better Office/IE Integration than Confluence, it also doesn't play particularly well with alternative platforms like firefox - I'd like to hear what your preferred Wiki platform is. I'm kind of a TWiki bigot personally, but if I had to drop a new wiki on a for-profit company tomorrow, it would probably be confluence.
Right, thanks for pointing that out. I was actually coming at it from a different angle - Atlassian's support, and the ecosystem (at least in the valley) around confluence, make it (in my opinion, I'm sure others might differ) a better fit for companies that are willing to pay money than a tool like TWiki.
It's not as big a difference today, though, then it was 6 years ago. But, the thing is, Atlassian almost gives away their software (compared to what other companies charge) - so, to some degree, it's almost like comparing two free software packages with each other.
Confluence's real competition is actually sharepoint, more than it is TWiki.
I used to be a Bitbucket customer but moved to repositoryhosting.com a few months ago. This is great news as I will likely return to Bitbucket. I stopped using the service this year because I needed many small repos (<15mb) and didn't want to pay upwards of $20-30 per month. Repositoryhosting.com offers unlimited repositories for $6 flat per month. If you require additional space you pay for that.
I really don't get the pricing plans for companies like Bitbucket and Github. $5-10 per month for personal projects is fine but up past that? Do these companies think for single user accounts all these repositories are active at once? How much more does it cost Github to store an additional repository for me (not to even mention gists which are stored as repos) because they are charging $1 per month to backup a few mbs. I would love to know the average repo size.
Look at it from a different angle - how many customers out there require code repositories? Now, let's say you want to have a 20-30 employee company, with a likely $3 million salary overhead and $10-15 Million dollar exit in 5-7 years.
How much do you have to charge per customer to hit that target? Remember, you have to cover Salary + Hosting/Hardware Overhead.
The most likely response would be "Why would someone expect to make that kind of money off of hosting repositories?"
My answer would be "Why would you expect a First Class Entrepreneur / Founding Team to commit their time to a endeavor that didn't have that class of pay out?"
Congrats BitBucket folks. My $0.02... I wonder if GitHub have had any offers to be bought out? It seems like they would, and they are continuously growing in personnel, so they can't be doing too badly. I'm also surprised that they said Atlassian will offer private repos for free forever. Forever seems like a pretty big promise, IMO.
I prefer mercurial over git, but being on bitbucket is starting to feel like being on Orkut when everyone else is on Facebook. Even with this announcement I'll probably start all new personal projects on github for the better visibility and collaboration with the hacker community.
Yeah well... thanks to people like you bitbucket will struggle to gain bigger community. Why not start projects on bitbucket, and then if it will not work out, move to github?
I DID get help from other people and commited my patches to some projects on bitbucket(also did on git). It's not like you wont get help on bb - its just a tool in the end.
One amusing thing only tangentially related to this - the unofficial mercurial plugin for Jira has been broken (in Windows) for months. We've been considering buying FishEye just to get decent hg integration!
One thing i'm hoping for are better community building tools on bitbucket for projects to promote themselves. This is the only part missing to get a bigger community
