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Is using mercurial+bitbucket instead of git+GitHub limiting my contributors?

4 points by doubleunplussed ↗ HN
I have a project using mercurial and hosted on bitbucket. We are a growing project and benefit a lot from third party contributors.

I recently found out that our most prolific third party contributor actually uses git to do and test his work, and only converts to mercurial commits for the pull requests.

Am I shooting myself in the foot by using mercurial?

We originally chose mercurial because our users (and thus likely contributors) are scientists (as are we), and many are unfamiliar with software development tools and practices, and frankly, nothing is as newbie friendly as tortoisehg (even as a mercurial expert tortoisehg is my preferred way to do 99% of my work with mercurial, and I will miss it sorely enough to attempt to write a clone of it for git if we switch to git). But it seems maybe the people most likely to contribute are the subset familiar with programming, and they are more likely to use git and github.

tl;dr should I move my project to git and github?

6 comments

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cylim
Github and Bitbucket is just a platform to host your code; it is relatively easier to get people to contribute to your project with GitHub if you have an open source project. Else, I would prefer to host in Bitbucket or GitLab.

About the source code control. generally, I would prefer git. You can take a look at https://www.atlassian.com/blog/git/git-vs-mercurial-why-git for making decisions.

wolco
Yes you are missing the network effect.
ocdtrekkie
Glancing at screenshots of tortoisehg[0], I can't fathom considering that more newbie friendly than a GitHub Deskop-type interface. (Though FWIW, GitHub Desktop is surely far more limited, it's less sophisticated in general, and won't meet all needs.) There are plenty of other Git UIs out there as well, of course.

As wolco said, you're surely missing out on network effect, people won't find your project if they're just searching GitHub (as many people, unfortunately, do lean towards).

I would ask your users though, rather than HN. HN is going to trend towards what's popular in general, rather than what your users like to work with. Find out how your users would feel about Git or a Git-based software solution, maybe mirror your project somewhere, be it GitHub or GitLab and let people test out what it'd be like to work from the Git side of things.

Hoping to get new contributors is great, but make sure your existing contributors are on board, or even enthusiastic, before you look for a migration.

[0] https://tortoisehg.bitbucket.io/screenshots.html

doubleunplussed
Tortoisehg being cross platform is important - users are on a mix of OSs and it's useful to be able to recommend one tool that their colleagues using the same software will also be using. Also, our software is controlled via scripts written by the user, and so we recommend they version control their own code. A uniform GUI for this makes it easier to get new students up to speed with how to operate these things. So version control isn't just for the developers necessarily (though there's no reason why we couldn't use git for development of the software itself even though the users use a different version control system)

Searching probably isn't how people find out about our project, though I'm not sure. We have a published paper that gets citations, so people find out that way, and I suspect it might be mostly word of mouth. But we really don't know.

You're right, we should ask them! But we have zero telemetry so we only know about the users who participate in the mailing list or issue tracker or otherwise contact us.

ocdtrekkie
I would point out that GitHub Desktop at least, is available on both Windows and Mac, and I was told yesterday is in beta for Linux. ;) I think it's quite common for version control tools to be cross-platform since they are often used to develop cross-platform software.

I would say the people making active participation in your mailing list or issue tracker, and especially those making patches to your actual software, likely represent the most active/invested members of your community, and definitely the best people to solicit opinions from. :)

ljw1001
Most likely, but being on Github is no guarantee of contributors. Exaggerating slightly, there is roughly one open-source project needing assistance for every living programmer.