Google Code: Wiki and Download Features
Yesterday the Google Code project hosting was updated for the first time (as far as I can tell) after its release in July 2006. Two of the major “flaws” in Google’s simplistic approach to Open Source project hosting have been fixed:
- We were unable to provide downloads of binary releases and similar
- Projects could not have a documentation webpage or similar
These two issues made Google Code hosting — while being a nice, new thing — overall inferior to the well-established services of sourceforge. And while Google made clear they didn’t “want to hurt SourceForge”, an important decision a young Open Source project faces when it starts is where to put the code and what is best for the project.
Not having any website or possibility to download a precompiled package is not one of the best things for projects, for sure.
With the new features, Google Code has become a real alternative to SourceForge and I imagine in the time to come, Google’s code hosting will steadily grow and get more projects that did not go there before for lack of these features.
A nice thing to mention about the Google Code hosting Wiki is that it apparently keeps its version history in SVN. So going back in time when checking out the source tree will also give you the Wiki status at that point in time. Very neat, if you ask me.
Adding downloads, however, sounds to me like a no-brainer and I am confused why they didn’t have this feature from the beginning. Allegedly, project owners helped themselves by just uploading the release files to the SVN source tree and pointing their download links directly to the HTTP interface of the SVN server. Not too surprising — and that can put quite some load on a repository server. This “feature” is therefore not so much a new invention as it is closing a hole that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
In any case I am eager to see how the open source community (and sourceforge) react.
December 20th, 2006 at 8:20 pm
We launched without downloads because we wanted to put the site into developers’ hands sooner rather than later. Given the growth and activity that we saw on the site, I think we made the right choice. Thousands of people were using the site regularly.
But yes… we knew it was a huge hole, and downloads has been our number one “big feature” to complete and to deploy. While we made a number of small improvements and changes to the site (e.g. issue change notification), you are right: nothing *big* since launch.
I hope you will enjoy the new features!
Cheers,
-g
January 17th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
We chose to release the service in July rather than hold it up waiting for downloads. Given how many projects still found the service useful, I think we made the right choice. We very much understood that it was sub-standard and did not meet the needs for most projects, but it was certainly able to help some. We were also able to get great feedback (and make fixes/improvements) to the features we *did* release.
I’m glad you like the new features, though! We’re going to continue interating on them… like the fact that you can use wiki markup on your project summary page now.
Cheers,
-g
January 17th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
(hopefully… you’ll moderate one of those two comments thru… the one from last month never got moderated…)
February 7th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Greg: I am sorry that I didn’t see the posts being in the moderation queue. Wordpress played a prank on me it seems like. I moderated them through now and if you feel like commenting again some time, you’re very welcome to. Thanks for your feedback!