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Code.Google.com now supports git

code.google.com

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Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#21

Post by CrLf »

shazow wrote: post #13

That's great, but I'm still slowly moving my projects over to Github. 1. I get much more engagement from random developers on Github. On Github, random people will fork and add features, do code reviews and leave comments. All of these things are technically possible on Google Code but nobody does it—probably due to the usability but possibly also a cultural problem. Github has a strong culture of collaboration becau…

Why doesn't anyone ever think about the users? You know, the ones that just want to grab some binaries and do stuff?

In the "old days", projects would have a webpage with some instructions, screenshots and downloadable binaries. The effort required to do this would pay off in terms of polish and would attract more users.

Today, people find out about this supposedly nice piece of software, and proceed to find only a source file listing, no documentation (not even a half-decent README), no screenshots and, worst of all, the need to build from source. I'm a technical person with a fair amount of curiosity for these things, and I find myself frequently bummed out and give up when I see a link to github.

Even when these "artifacts" exist, just the look of the site is enough to put regular users off.

Sharing code is not only about dumping a source tree online. It's about polishing all that surrounds it and makes it a "product". Without users a source tree has no value.

Frankly, the current situation is making the open-source community more and more closed in on itself. The first step for irrelevance.

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#22

Post by nakkiel »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #19
beder wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even better, explain what about the UI could be improved. I've been using Google Code for several years, and I love the UI.

For starters: What is the #1 reason to visit a project page? To download the source. Does the #2 reason come even close? No. So why in the world is the repo URL not on the front page, and easy for me to copy/paste into a terminal? Why? Github even has a button that will copy it to the clipboard for you!

Meh. The term 'Project' embodies much much more than just 'code'. A Project is made of its many components: team, community, bug trackers, documentation, resources, news feed and code (I've certainly omitted several other things).

Only after looking at these elements can you get a picture of the project which will tell you a lot about it. How is the support? Do developers even care? Are they serious at issues handling? Etc.

OSS suffers a lot from people who think they can just paste the code, change the implementation when they feel like it, etc.

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#23

Post by kpanghmc »

While I agree with the sentiment in this thread that developers aren't going to be flocking over from GitHub anytime soon, at the very least this should help keep GitHub motivated (not that they've given us any reason for concern thus far). Competition is a good thing.

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#24

Post by levesque »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #19
beder wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even better, explain what about the UI could be improved. I've been using Google Code for several years, and I love the UI.

For starters: What is the #1 reason to visit a project page? To download the source. Does the #2 reason come even close? No. So why in the world is the repo URL not on the front page, and easy for me to copy/paste into a terminal? Why? Github even has a button that will copy it to the clipboard for you!

I disagree with your #1 reason. When I visit a project page, I most often only want to know what the hell the project is about.

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#25

Post by shareme »

jhawk28 wrote: post #11
seanmccann wrote: post #7

Are there really any reasons to use Google Code when GitHub is kicking so much ass?

Its a distributed system. Use them both if you want. Each have their strengths.

so is bitbucket and bitbucket has unlimited space if you are under 5 users per project

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#26

Post by luigi »

CrLf wrote: post #21
shazow wrote: post #13

That's great, but I'm still slowly moving my projects over to Github. 1. I get much more engagement from random developers on Github. On Github, random people will fork and add features, do code reviews and leave comments. All of these things are technically possible on Google Code but nobody does it—probably due to the usability but possibly also a cultural problem. Github has a strong culture of collaboration becau…

Why doesn't anyone ever think about the users? You know, the ones that just want to grab some binaries and do stuff? In the "old days", projects would have a webpage with some instructions, screenshots and downloadable binaries. The effort required to do this would pay off in terms of polish and would attract more users. Today, people find out about this supposedly nice piece of software, and proceed to find only a s…

I've never seen this. Any concrete examples?

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#28

Post by CrLf »

luigi wrote: post #26
CrLf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't anyone ever think about the users? You know, the ones that just want to grab some binaries and do stuff? In the "old days", projects would have a webpage with some instructions, screenshots and downloadable binaries. The effort required to do this would pay off in terms of polish and would attract more users. Today, people find out about this supposedly nice piece of software, and proceed to find only a s…

I've never seen this. Any concrete examples?

Any project on github. Put yourself in the shoes of a user that doesn't want to donwnload source. He lands on a github project page and just gives up.

For a regular user (where "regular" depends on the type of software and the technical skill it requires), this is going way back to the days of source sharing on Usenet, way before the open-source term was mainstream (or even coined).

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#29

Post by andos »

sussman wrote: post #17
shazow wrote: post #13

That's great, but I'm still slowly moving my projects over to Github. 1. I get much more engagement from random developers on Github. On Github, random people will fork and add features, do code reviews and leave comments. All of these things are technically possible on Google Code but nobody does it—probably due to the usability but possibly also a cultural problem. Github has a strong culture of collaboration becau…

(Speaking purely for myself here.) I agree the code is important, but I think a cohesive project is more important. Github presents itself as a giant pastebin for code, with "projects" bolted on. Google Code presents projects first, and puts the code at an even level with every other part: bugtracker, downloads, wiki. (That said, I agree pull requests would be cool.)

That's the problem with Google Code, in my opinion. It tries to be both a landing page and a project manager for my software when I'd rather take care of the former myself. It ends up sucking at both, unfortunately.

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#30

Post by CrLf »

nakkiel wrote: post #22
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For starters: What is the #1 reason to visit a project page? To download the source. Does the #2 reason come even close? No. So why in the world is the repo URL not on the front page, and easy for me to copy/paste into a terminal? Why? Github even has a button that will copy it to the clipboard for you!

Meh. The term 'Project' embodies much much more than just 'code'. A Project is made of its many components: team, community, bug trackers, documentation, resources, news feed and code (I've certainly omitted several other things). Only after looking at these elements can you get a picture of the project which will tell you a lot about it. How is the support? Do developers even care? Are they serious at issues handlin…

"How is the support? Do developers even care? Are they serious at issues handling? Etc."

This can't be stressed enough. A prospective user first-and-foremost wants to have an answer to the question "Is this piece of software worthy of my time?". If it fails to answer this question quickly, it will lose the user.

We are used to seeing this kind of ignorance from corporations: "Let's dump this piece of code online. A community will form and users will come by the millions." How many times has this worked?

Right now there are loads of interesting projects on github. Projects that will never be sucessful because they failed to do the extra effort required to "market" them.

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