Bidding farewell to Google Code • Hacker News Board

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#201

Post by aikah » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 6:46 PM UTC

magicalist wrote: post #33

reuven wrote: post #24

GitHub's success is due, in no small part, to their excellent interface. Google Code was, by contrast, always ugly, hard to navigate, and hard to understand. (This, of course, ignores the many features that GitHub offers, which Google Code doesn't.) I know of many companies that learned about GitHub via open-source projects, which GitHub hosts for free, and decided that it was so good that they should pay money. Host…

> Google Code was, by contrast, always ugly, hard to navigate, and hard to understand. Er, do you remember 2006? Google Code was a breath of fresh air, and a huge huge improvement over what was available at Sourceforge. This isn't damning with faint praise either, it really was clean and fast and easy to use as a developer and user. It didn't do everything you wanted it to, but it did what it did so much better than…

> Er, do you remember 2006? Google Code was a breath of fresh air,

Yet the product interface was stuck in 2006. It feels like a project that was "okayed" by some management but then "we don't want to put a cent on it".

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#202

Post by crumpled » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 6:47 PM UTC

notsony wrote: post #146

cdibona wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a very nice system, but the stuff that goes into a shutdown had me fighting to keep the message as tight as possible. I wanted to go on about Bitbucket, gitlab, and put in a long discussion about how this doesn't effect the scalable git team at google at all (we host android and chrome and a ton of internal teams on a git backed on our backends here) , but had to keep the message pure... But I heartily recommen…

Rather than recommending a specific Git hoster such as Github, you should have listed out alternatives... especially as Google Code also supports Subversion and Mercurial.

But, they wrote a Google Code to GitHub exporter tool. They felt the need to make a customer friendly egress tool, but not write a dozen of them. I think developers kinda know where they want to land already, and if they don't, they could do a google search, which would ultimately result in them using Github or Bitbucket, in all likelihood.

From a user action perspective, if you give a user who doesn't know what their options are too many options, they won't take action. They'll feel the need to explore all the different paths, and feel anxiety about making the right choice. I think giving users fewer things to think about is actually better a lot of the time.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#203

Post by lucb1e » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 6:52 PM UTC

> We were worried about reliability

You don't say?

After pulling the plug on all the products I liked, I'm worried too.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#204

Post by some_furry » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 6:52 PM UTC

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #198

some_furry wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said "absolutely no reason" and I gave you an edge case that invalidates your statement. Maybe "generally no reason" would be better?

Nothing in the world is absolute. However so far I have not hear any non nebulous reasons why an Open Source project should be on gitlab.

> Nothing in the world is absolute.

I'll drink to that :)

> However so far I have not hear any non nebulous reasons why an Open Source project should be on gitlab.

Heh, that's okay. I'm not here to convince anyone of anything.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#205

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 6:53 PM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #29

reuven wrote: post #24

GitHub's success is due, in no small part, to their excellent interface. Google Code was, by contrast, always ugly, hard to navigate, and hard to understand. (This, of course, ignores the many features that GitHub offers, which Google Code doesn't.) I know of many companies that learned about GitHub via open-source projects, which GitHub hosts for free, and decided that it was so good that they should pay money. Host…

"Google Code was, by contrast, always ugly, hard to navigate, and hard to understand." It's really funny to hear this. If you look at press/reviews/OSS forum comments of it around launch time, people thought it had an excellent interface, because it was being compared to sourceforge. Then github came, and by comparison, the interface looked like crap. But you end up with this kind of weird history rewrite where the v…

[deleted]

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#206

Post by BinaryIdiot » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 6:53 PM UTC

sytse wrote: post #170

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah for whatever reason I didn't see that at all.

No problem, it is not that obvious, any suggestions how to make it more findable without messing up the other options are welcome.

Well for me personally I always head straight to the pricing page of any service I'm interested in and I didn't see any mention of the repository hosting you do there. Is that just for support / enterprise installations? Might be helpful to mention it there.

But beyond that I dunno.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#207

Post by the_mitsuhiko » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 6:56 PM UTC

sytse wrote: post #199

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GnuTLS did not move, they were moved because Gitorious got acquired by gitlab.

We did not move anybody. People imported their repo's themselves. Another project that moved is F-droid https://gitlab.com/u/fdroid that was before the acquisition.

Gitorious has a header that informs people to migrate to Gitlab.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#208

Post by aikah » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 6:58 PM UTC

k3n wrote: post #196

comex wrote: post #171

Ugh. No, not that Google Code is shutting down, per se. The alternatives are better and for active projects there is plenty of time to migrate. What I object to is that the site will only be preserved in read-only mode for 5 months, despite its popularity and the resulting large number of deep links into it on the Web. Why not forever? git, hg, and I believe svn can all provide read-only access (with some bandwidth o…

Google hates anything that requires a human's touch, and per the article: > Lately, the administrative load has consisted almost exclusively of abuse management. They see Google Code as a time-sink, and they're probably right, and it's not surprising to me that they'd drop something that is no longer serving it's intended purpose, but instead has negative implications for their model. Keeping it going forward would r…

> I work on Google Code, and we will be putting a service in place to redirect deep links to project homepages, issues, etc. to their new locations.

And this is an opt in service, nothing is automated. They could ,AT LEAST, partner with Github or someone else to have the whole thing automated... Seriously... the really want to put 0 money in that stuff,they don't give a damn.

There are seriously good projects that will be lost no question.Open source code is a community wealth,even in funky languages nobody use anymore. What Google is doing makes sense from a business stand point but totally shameful from a company that boasts itself doing "no evil".

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#209

Post by notsony » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 6:58 PM UTC

crumpled wrote: post #202

notsony wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rather than recommending a specific Git hoster such as Github, you should have listed out alternatives... especially as Google Code also supports Subversion and Mercurial.

But, they wrote a Google Code to GitHub exporter tool. They felt the need to make a customer friendly egress tool, but not write a dozen of them. I think developers kinda know where they want to land already, and if they don't, they could do a google search, which would ultimately result in them using Github or Bitbucket, in all likelihood. From a user action perspective, if you give a user who doesn't know what thei…

Yes, good for customers to have a friendly exit path, but I'm sure Google are capable of writing a Google Code to AnyGitHostingCompany exporter tool :-)

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#210

Post by sytse » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 6:58 PM UTC

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #206

sytse wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No problem, it is not that obvious, any suggestions how to make it more findable without messing up the other options are welcome.

Well for me personally I always head straight to the pricing page of any service I'm interested in and I didn't see any mention of the repository hosting you do there. Is that just for support / enterprise installations? Might be helpful to mention it there. But beyond that I dunno.

It is mentioned there but pretty low on the page, "Sign up for our free GitLab.com service if you want to use GitLab without installing it.". What do you think?