Atlassian, the company that owns and operates the Bitbucket source code management service, has today announced they will sunset support for Mercurial source code management where Mercurial features and repositories will be officially removed from Bitbucket and its API on June 1, 2020.
How does this impact the viewers and OpenSim you might ask?
Linden Lab hosts all their viewer code repositories, including the required libraries in Bitbucket using Mercurial and not Git. Because of that the majority of third party viewer developers, including Dayturn, do the same, so this has potentially a major impact, at least in the short term.
Any existing code repositories will either have to be converted to use Git - a process that is both complicated and error prone for such a complicated project and set of interacting repository. At best it will lead to major disruption in progressing the viewer code, at worst valuable history and context will be lost in addition to the disruption.
Alternatives to converting to Git is currently unclear, and could include self hosting, but would have the effect of scattering repositories across multiple sites with differing functionality. It also adds another burden to developers managing hardware resources and backing up the repositories; tasks that were left to Bitbucket to handle.
Converting to Git would probably be a big advantage as both Apple and Microsoft has broad support for Git in Xcode and Visual Studio, so interoperability with both those two environments would be much improved.
How does this impact the viewers and OpenSim you might ask?
Linden Lab hosts all their viewer code repositories, including the required libraries in Bitbucket using Mercurial and not Git. Because of that the majority of third party viewer developers, including Dayturn, do the same, so this has potentially a major impact, at least in the short term.
Any existing code repositories will either have to be converted to use Git - a process that is both complicated and error prone for such a complicated project and set of interacting repository. At best it will lead to major disruption in progressing the viewer code, at worst valuable history and context will be lost in addition to the disruption.
Alternatives to converting to Git is currently unclear, and could include self hosting, but would have the effect of scattering repositories across multiple sites with differing functionality. It also adds another burden to developers managing hardware resources and backing up the repositories; tasks that were left to Bitbucket to handle.
Converting to Git would probably be a big advantage as both Apple and Microsoft has broad support for Git in Xcode and Visual Studio, so interoperability with both those two environments would be much improved.
