[isabelle-dev] Sunsetting Mercurial support in Bitbucket

[Lars Hupel]

> For various Isabelle add-on repositories and clones there is already
> https://isabelle.sketis.net/repos -- I will put more emphasis on this 
> in
> the near future.

That is irrelevant for the AFP, though.

The value proposition of a hosted Mercurial service is that user 
management is extremely cheap, and as opposed to the Unix user model 
does not conflate two different aspects (namely "shell and 
administrative repository access" and "able to push monotonic changes"). 
There are some services out there that offer the same convenience as 
e.g. GitHub or Bitbucket on this, but my earlier investigations (~2 
years ago) didn't bring up any good candidates. I will revisit this at 
some point, because AFP definitely needs to make some switch.

> Note that I have no inclination to move away from Mercurial to Git, 
> just
> because the noisy crowds out there are doing it. In the past 1-2 years 
> I
> have occasionally worked with colleagues on git projects and I am very
> glad that we don't have this messy pop-culture in our nice and elitist
> Isabelle environment.

I'm sorry to interrupt your rant, but ignoring industry (and academia 
too) only gets you so far.

Mercurial is poorly supported, both from a development and a tooling 
(see above) point of a view.

It is not very scientific of you to just rule out tools for no other 
reason than "I don't like them".