Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Code.Google.com now supports git

code.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 83 posts

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#31

Post by mnutt »

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…

In Github's case, most of the projects there are libraries and the users are developers. The people who like Github probably expect the first thing they see when they show up to a project to be the code. And I'd wager that for many developers, checking out the repo is quicker and more convenient than downloading a tarball.

Github's UI admittedly doesn't make for a great experience for someone browsing around looking for software to download. A project that is trying to appeal to regular users should set up a wiki page, or even better, use Github Pages to build a site.

Though, I really hate it when I follow a link to a Rails app on Github that left the default "Welcome to Rails" readme.

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#32

Post by jjm »

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…

GitHub and Bitbucket is for code, and for people to interact with other coders.

You really don't go to GitHub and Bitbucket to download your favorite binary. That is what sourceforge, Top100 xyz, and Cnet is for.

The projects that are popular have people willing to help (read: contribute) to the project in classic open source engagement.

On top of that, GitHub & BitBucket enable the single/small group maintainer to write a readme that gets displayed.

I use both.

If your fav project doesn't have Mom+Pop friendly page with by all means please fork + contribute.

See:

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/

http://mbostock.github.com/d3/

http://github.com/jquery/jquery

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#33

Post by mikeash »

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…

Whenever I go to download an open source project, I end up on a web site built for it which has exactly what you mention. GitHub doesn't have those, but GitHub isn't intended to be the first page the end user finds either. GitHub is for developers, and any project that wants to be accessible to non-developers should set up a separate page as well. Nothing wrong with that from what I can see.

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#34

Post by luigi »

CrLf wrote: post #28
luigi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Why would someone go to GitHub if they don't want to download source code?

Please, an example.

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#35

Post by jjm »

levesque wrote: post #24
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!

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.

Well, I'm going to say that you already have a gist of what the project is about otherwise why would you be on that repo Unless you were literally randomly clicking.

GitHub allows messaging, why not ping the author? Or create an issue "Needs Documentation? Or even contributing to docs?

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#36

Post by pasbesoin »

cdibona wrote: post #4

I'd say a better link is to the issue we marked 'fixed' : http://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=2454 Or to the project creation page: http://code.google.com/hosting/createProject We hope you like it.

Sign in page does not (yet) mention Git, just FYI:

Open source your projects using Google Project Hosting

Google Project Hosting is a fast, reliable, and easy open source hosting service. Google Project Hosting gives you:

    + Instant project creation on any topic
    + Subversion and Mercurial code hosting with 2
      gigabytes of storage space
    + Download hosting support with 2 gigabytes of storage
      space
    + Integrated source code browsing and code review tools
      to make it easy to view code, review contributions,
      and maintain a high quality code base
    + An issue tracker and project wiki that are simple,
      yet flexible and powerful, and can adapt to any
      development process
    + Starring and update streams that make it easy to keep
      track of projects and developers that you care about
*

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#37

Post by CrLf »

mnutt wrote: post #31
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…

In Github's case, most of the projects there are libraries and the users are developers. The people who like Github probably expect the first thing they see when they show up to a project to be the code. And I'd wager that for many developers, checking out the repo is quicker and more convenient than downloading a tarball. Github's UI admittedly doesn't make for a great experience for someone browsing around looking…

When looking out for libraries I need to have answers to the following questions:

1. Is the library stable/complete? 2. Is the API stable? 3. If not, how frequently/how much does it change?

With a decent project page, I can have these questions answered either directly or by looking at the available downloads history (even if they are source-only downloads) and version numbers. With github projects I frequently can't answer any of those questions.

Libraries are products, just like any other piece of software.

I'm not saying that github isn't good for developer collaboration. I'm saying it's no good for developer-user relations. It has the necessary features, but it doesn't encourage its use by the very nature of its interface.

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#38

Post by jjm »

cdibona wrote: post #4

I'd say a better link is to the issue we marked 'fixed' : http://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=2454 Or to the project creation page: http://code.google.com/hosting/createProject We hope you like it.

How about linking Google code to Google+. Where projects have their own 'Project+' personality and what not. You could even have a 'downloads' like 'Photos' for all the people who don't seem to like GitHub (don't know why but ok).

I have tons of more suggestions... of course they will need to be validated :-P

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#39

Post by dave1010uk »

cdibona wrote: post #4

I'd say a better link is to the issue we marked 'fixed' : http://code.google.com/p/support/issues/detail?id=2454 Or to the project creation page: http://code.google.com/hosting/createProject We hope you like it.

I got an email alert on that issue and all it said was resolution changed to fixed, with no comment. I thought it could be a mistake so I went to code.google.com looking for some kind of announcement and found nothing, then finally found the create project page and saw the drop-down with git in it!

Thanks for all the hard work you guys have put into it. I think many people don't realise how much work goes into something when you deploy it on a Google scale.

Re: Code.Google.com now supports git

#40

Post by Kwpolska »

shareme wrote: post #25
jhawk28 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Bitbucket? No, thanks. It doesn't have the awesomeness of GitHub. GitHub uses JavaScript for everything. You have keyboard shortcuts, AJAX repository browsing, awesome issues system...
Post reply on HN