Bitbucket, a code hosting and collaborative site for developers, now has Git support.

"Adding Git support is a natural move for Bitbucket," Bitbucket Product Manager Justen Stepka tells LAUNCH via email. "Much of the DVCS [ Distributed Version Control System ] market has moved towards Git and by adding Git support to Bitbucket we are better able to serve all DVCS users."

Users can now store code all in one place, whether they're using Hg or Git. Programmers and developers can also easily import Git, Mercurial or Subversion source code. Bitbucket also added an importer for GitHub, and a new user interface for repository and administration pages.

LAUNCH has contacted GitHub for comment and will update if we get a response.

Bitbucket will still remain agnostic to technologies like Git and Mercurial, "focusing on enabling developers to better collaborate and ship code faster," Justen says.

Commenters on Hacker News are posting mixed reviews.

"This is great news, very exciting for people who need a nice place to stash all their private git repos but didn't want to upgrade their GitHub plans for not-that-important projects," HN user johnthedebs writes. "Very interesting that they've decided to compete directly too."

Another user, Leaf Storm, writes that Bitbucket may have a hard time challenging GitHub.

"GitHub is already pretty firmly entrenched in the Git community," Leaf Storm writes. "I will say, however, that Bitbucket has one primary advantage over GitHub: Unlimited private repositories, with the cost being based on how many collaborators you have. If Bitbucket really promotes this angle, I could see a lot of small development teams moving to Bitbucket, and possibly taking their talent with them. So, if Bitbucket really pushes the 'unlimited private repositories' angle, then they could begin taking back market share from GitHub."

A daily Bitbucket user, mushishi, writes that the service still needs to improve its navigation.

"It's quite painful to browse source code via web," mushishi writes. "If I just want to quickly look at someone's repository, I will make a lot of browsing, and it's just way too slow. Compare it to Github's slick UI. But I am optimistic Bitbucket will change it for the better."

Bitbucket was founded by Jesper Noehr in 2009. Software company Atlassian acquired Bitbucket in September 2010.

Try out the new Bitbucket here.

CONTACTS & LINKS

Justen Stepka, Bitbucket Product Manager
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/justen-stepka/1/413/454
Google+: https://plus.google.com/115735881302640916242/posts

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