Today, on the one-year anniversary of the purchase of BitBucket, Atlassian announced that BitBucket will be offering Git repositories, as well as their long-supported Hg repositories.
The blog is clear that this does not represent a shift away from Mercurial; rather, as Google Code decided to support Git earlier this year, that there are preferred version control systems for individuals. In order to capture a wide a market share as possible, Atlassian felt that BitBucket had to get into the Git repository hosting (as well as Subversion) in order to make an impact in the DVCS world.
Repositories created in BitBucket have the choice of whether they will be Hg backed or Git backed. There is currently no conversion tool which can be invoked by the repository at this time; however, there are import tools that can consume from a remote Svn, Git or Hg repository. This could permit repositories hosted at BitBucket to be imported from a different repository backing type.
Atlassian hope this will be able to make a dent in with the million GitHub repositories, a milestone reached in July 2010, and (more recently) the one millionth user of the service. (GitHub reached 100,000 users in July 2009.) At the time of the acquisition (September 2010), BitBucket boasted 60,000 users but no public data has been released since then.
It's clear that distributed version control systems are the future, and that BitBucket is a place which can host you project, what ever your preferred distributed version control system is.
