This is in part some naming annoyance. Bitbucket let you once use your own domains for repos. Which was nice as you could migrate if you wanted.
The forks thing could be tackled. With a notification, something like I forked you. Or a code search engine which is clever enough to detect and link repos.
The user management gubbins, is the normal irritation of user management and access control.
The stars part is already a bit of a horror across all software - not knowing how to gauge the popularity and quality of a project. Nevermind searching for it.
I'm not the biggest user of these silo repos, but I do appreciate that thin barriers to entry, and improved usability or a good usability wrapper, is charming.
Bitbucket also has awkward URLs, where my fork of someone else repo appears as a subdirectory of their project. I still can't get over the fact that the Bitbucket website won't let (easily) visitors search without creating an account. That's a terrible user experience and I'm sure many potential users or customers just choose the tab and go to GitHub.
For me the experience of managing open source repositories gets worse with recent bitbucket updates to the point that I'm in process of moving my open-source to github.
How one is supposed to find what have bitbucketer done? Visit e.g. Ian Bicking's account: https://bitbucket.org/ianb . Is it easy to find out why are so many people following Ian? What repositories are interesting? "bbdocs" with 4 followers? From the first page of Ian's repositories I know "dozer", did Ian wrote it? Click. Oh, it's an outdated fork.
Just compare the direction Github took at its recent redesign. GitHub folks made user profiles act like resume. The repositories are visually big, it is clear what repositories are popular, what repos are active, etc. It is also clear what a person is into: repositories are sorted by 'last modified' date. There is "Explore" section with trending repos (bitbucket's Explore is a joke) and so on.
Bitbucket instead removed follower counts and fork counts from the repositories list; repositories are sorted alphabetically now; there is no way to see who the user follows or who user is followed by.
I was missing important ticket updates at bitbucket several times because the newsfeed is not "infinite"; "Inbox" messages count stops working sometimes, etc.
There are things bitbucket is better at: e.g. github links to source code lines are awful (they don't contain changeset information in URL by default and so easily become outdated); there is no way to specify repo language in github (one of my recent Python repos was in a "Top followed this week" for a C language, that's great of course but..)
Don't get me wrong, bitbucket becomes nicer and nicer, I'm still a heavy bitbucket user and we use a paid account at work; but it seems that the open source support (code discovery and presentation) is not their priority right now, or at least they act so.
Bitbucket PM here - thanks for sharing this. We definitely have a lot we can improve around PRs and have some folks looking into it now. We'll definitely take your ideas into consideration.
I'm curious about how you use Bitbucket Cloud. Why did you decide to base your dev flow on forks and bookmarks instead of named branches? Are you working as an individual (and accepting PRs on open source or similar) or as part of a team?
Have you given any thought to moving to named branches -- or even git? Are there other problems there that you're trying to avoid? (As you might imagine, that's where the majority of our customers are today, using various branching models on git rather than forks/bookmarks on hg.)
Exactly my point -- these 'new' Bitbucket features are a blatant clone of Github as well. I was expecting more from all the fanfare.
For instance, users are clamoring to be able to link external issue trackers of their choice (which can be done simply by URL). I think the first host to supply that feature will have a step up.
Even prior to its acquisition. I seriously disliked finding projects on Bitbucket, the UX just seems to be wrong for how I want to interact with codebases and documentation. It's only gotten worse since they were bought.
Dev attached to the Bitbucket team here. While we love and support open source where we can, the vast majority of repositories on Bitbucket are private or public but maintained by a single organization. Our core focus is professional teams, which typically means branching (rather than forking) workflows. This has lead us to prioritize features like branch level permissions over network graphs and other features focused on forking workflows, because they are of higher value to our users. We're not ideologically opposed to them (indeed, forks are useful for some professional workflows too - such as working with contractors or external contributors), but they just haven't bubbled up to the top of our roadmap just yet.
At a small company here, and we moved from GitHub to BitBucket because both the pricing (a couple dozen private repos) and user-management were more friendly. User management is one of those things people hand-wave away until they're the poor sap who has to manage it.
I agree, but they are a bit of a phenomenon given the amount of marketshare they actually have. They have something else going for them, and I think it's that they are the default option for most new developers as their centralized repository.
It's interesting because bitbucket still offers free private repos yet doesn't seem to have nearly as much following as github.
Having not used that many, I like GitHub's over BitBucket's because it has tagging and milestones, which are vastly more useful than some preset priority and type fields. GitHub's is a lot closer to how my brain works.
It just seems funny to me that a company that also makes a bug tracking system has a really bad one coupled with it's version control hosting. It makes some sense, but it bugs me.
Atlassian for one. Their old code viewer was a disaster but that might have been Bitbucket’s fault. The repository list lazy loads, and if you’re at a big enough company the repositories get into multiple projects and it’s always disorganized. Which project is this repo in again? Time to hunt around and oh yeah CTRL-F doesn’t work unless you remember to scroll to the bottom repeatedly.
I use BitBucket, because it's free and I've been using it for a long time. Maybe GitHub is faster, but I don't access BitBucket enough to justify migrating ~50 repos I have. Can't be bothered. Its UI/UX? meh. I got used to it.
I use Confluence and Jira because, again, we use them at work. So I guess I'm using them because I have to. I also understand it's a pain to move our company from one to another (oh we've had discussions to move to Coda and others) but again, I'm not taking on that project. Again, UI/UX, search - all meh - they are working and I got used to it.
The inconvenience of using them does not justify the amount of time I need to spend to overcome my inconvenience. Some things, you just have to let them slide.
I really like Bitbucket. I never had issues and I love the fact that I have access to free private repositories. That alone is the killer feature. I like Github, but I am not that much of a social developer therefore all their social aspect to me is not that important and the fact that I need to keep my repositories open or pay is actually a downside when the competition does exactly the same thing without this problems.
I think Github unnecessarily is having a LOT of its lunch eaten by Bitbucket b/c of its unwillingness to let people just have a bunch of small private repos for low activity work.
I'd just like to add that one thing I like that bitbucket offers over github is free private git repositories (if you don't mind being limited to 5 users). Not compelling for everyone, but it's nice to have the option.
The forks thing could be tackled. With a notification, something like I forked you. Or a code search engine which is clever enough to detect and link repos.
The user management gubbins, is the normal irritation of user management and access control.
The stars part is already a bit of a horror across all software - not knowing how to gauge the popularity and quality of a project. Nevermind searching for it.
I'm not the biggest user of these silo repos, but I do appreciate that thin barriers to entry, and improved usability or a good usability wrapper, is charming.
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