End of an Experiment

tl;dr: We’ll be shutting down the Firefox mirrors on Bitbucket.

A long time ago we started an experiment to see if there was any support for developing Mozilla products on social coding sites. Well, the community-at-large has spoken, with the results many predicted:

YES!!! when the social coding site is GitHub

No, when the social coding site is Bitbucket

There was so much interest from GitHub users that the site has been clear win, from the very start. There are currently several efforts underway to make it easier for contributors on GitHub to contribute directly to Firefox (which remains hosted on our mercurial server).

However, there hasn’t been any similar interest on Bitbucket. Only one person ever forked even one of the repositories. In addition, the Firefox repos have grown to exceed the 2GiB maximum size that is supported by Bitbucket. (And has long been over the 1GiB maximum free hosting size, which means community members would need to pay to have a copy there.)

As we replace the legacy vcs-sync system with modern vcs-sync, we will stop updating the repositories on Bitbucket. As we stop updates, we’re remove the repositories to avoid confusion as to their status.