Bidding farewell to Google Code • Hacker News Board

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#361

Post by chernevik » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:01 AM 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…

But the parent comment gave a very plausible suggestion for how Google can do this in a very low maintenance way. Yes, there is abuse management, but now that they're read-only I'd expect this to fall off pretty fast.

Google's first business is access to information about links. You'd think they would be more careful about propagating link rot.

Unless they _want_ link rot, as they're much better positioned to handle changes in links than any search engine entrant?

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#362

Post by sytse » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:04 AM UTC

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #311

sytse wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the great feedback! I've changed the homepage according to your feedback in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/3a09175f... https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ mentions that it runs the enterprise edition in the middle box The pricing page is a hard one, we'll look into that. Any idea how we can make the three blurbs on the homepage feel more like different products?

Btw my suggestions were just a template. I'm flattered that you used them as is :) 1. For the blurbs - remove the icons and add headers. Something like this - https://cloudup.com/cGSjRmrWGkU 2. Gitlab.com as a product name is very confusing. When I first checked out gitlab.com my thought was "I'm already on gitlab.com, what's this other gitlab.com" :) So I have changed it to Gitlab Hosted to make it more clear Other…

Thanks for the great comments! We fixed the blurbs with https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/8e24fc11... and the homepage is greatly improved because of it.

We'll try to improve the rest too and track it in issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/271

Thank you very much for your kind comments.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#363

Post by jpatokal » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:08 AM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #342

jpatokal wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chris diBona says Google will be keeping a public copy of all unmigrated repos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9192554

Can that be relied upon as an official Google statement?

Chris DiBona is Google's Director of Open Source and the author of the blog post announcing the deprecation, so I'd say yes. But he's "planning", not guaranteeing it.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#364

Post by timgws » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:24 AM UTC

lloydde wrote: post #18

cdibona wrote: post #2

Hi everyone. I wanted to let you know (and I know this isn't a huge surprise) that we will be shutting down the Google Code project hosting system over the next year. Wired did a nice story about Github that touches on the shutdown: http://www.wired.com/2015/03/github-conquered-google-microso... I'll be hanging around answering questions, but the short form of 'why' is that it just isn't used much anymore, ourselves…

I got a kick out of the CmdTaco cameo in the Wired article: “GitHub is just really smooth,” says Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda, who lived through the open source revolution as the editor-in-chief of the tech site Slashdot. “It’s a sexy, modern interface.” These are some captions in need of a meme generator.

Consider it done. http://i.imgur.com/Xdmlj6v.jpg

In all seriousness, though, I started my own open source project hosting website back in the day. It was the first to offer public Mercurial and Git hosting.

Google Code existed then and the interface and functionality has not really changed since I released the first version of the site.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#365

Post by eli » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:30 AM UTC

blakeyrat wrote: post #318

cdibona wrote: post #2

Hi everyone. I wanted to let you know (and I know this isn't a huge surprise) that we will be shutting down the Google Code project hosting system over the next year. Wired did a nice story about Github that touches on the shutdown: http://www.wired.com/2015/03/github-conquered-google-microso... I'll be hanging around answering questions, but the short form of 'why' is that it just isn't used much anymore, ourselves…

Are there any alternatives that allow the use of SVN? I use Google Code to store my Skyrim mods-- because Skyrim mods heavily depend on being in the Skyrim folder structure, I need to have them on SVN (or TFS, I guess) so I can create "sparse" repos. Git doesn't allow this.

Doesn't github provide svn access? Bitbucket too, I think.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#366

Post by max0563 » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:36 AM UTC

This is a sad day, all of my early projects were hosted on Google Code. I'm sad to see it go.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#367

Post by jamiesonbecker » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:43 AM UTC

NeutronBoy wrote: post #354

dchichkov wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Example. A cancer researcher, publishes a paper in Nature Genetics. Like this one: http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v42/n3/abs/ng.522.html In that paper she publishes a link to a Google Code repository as supplement materials. For example, in the aforementioned paper there is a link to the following repository: http://code.google.com/p/glu-genetics/

Given she published the paper and link, she should either a) take responsibility for the general availability of the materials, and b) make sure that if people email her for the materials (after finding that they're not available on Google Code) she shares them. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for retaining the materials and knowledge, etc etc. I'm just having a hard time understanding why you expect Google to do the wor…

Megaupload did not hold itself out as a repository for original work.

Megaupload is not run by Google, with the stated mission of organizing the world's information.

Megaupload is bankrupt. Google is one of the richest technology companies in history.

This is not Megaupload throwing away its hoard of 90's B movies. This is Google, knowingly and literally throwing away coding history. We don't even know what might be thrown away.

What if some currently unknown researcher wrote his first code and uploaded it to Google code and forgot about it, and turned out to be the next Zuckerberg or even Turing?

What if some valuable research that was entrusted to Google from a deceased researcher suddenly disappears?

There are likely many more unintended consequences stemming from such an act, and I don't think we should give Google a pass, especially since Google controls possibly the largest collection of computers on the planet. (besides, source code tends to compress pretty well!)

Seems like the least they could do is stick it in an 'unlimited' Google Drive and lock it as read only.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#368

Post by makomk » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:43 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #357

bigiain wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody else did have a usenet archive - Google bought them, mashed up a bunch of other nn-usenet Google stuff into it, then let it bitrot until it was effectively useless, and then removed the only search features that worked... (Admittedly, if I recall correctly, Dejanews had already gone broke trying to maintain that archive before Google bought it, so arguably Google didn't kill it, they just bought the dying co…

And in the intervening years, no one running a news server thought to back theirs up, no one crawled Google and made torrents? This is software, not ancient manuscripts written by scribes on now crumbling vellum - there is no excuse for there to be one canonical copy of anything . Every pornographic movie ever made has multiple redundant backups on decentralized peer to peer networks and darknets. I understand the im…

Why would they run their own Usenet archive? Google had the Usenet archiving business sewn up, and by the time they started showing signs of being untrustworthy it was too late and much of the 80s and early 90s stuff only exists in their archives. (Oh, and as a side note apparently a lot of the interesting porn from that era has been lost to history too.)

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#369

Post by makomk » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:43 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #357

bigiain wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody else did have a usenet archive - Google bought them, mashed up a bunch of other nn-usenet Google stuff into it, then let it bitrot until it was effectively useless, and then removed the only search features that worked... (Admittedly, if I recall correctly, Dejanews had already gone broke trying to maintain that archive before Google bought it, so arguably Google didn't kill it, they just bought the dying co…

And in the intervening years, no one running a news server thought to back theirs up, no one crawled Google and made torrents? This is software, not ancient manuscripts written by scribes on now crumbling vellum - there is no excuse for there to be one canonical copy of anything . Every pornographic movie ever made has multiple redundant backups on decentralized peer to peer networks and darknets. I understand the im…

Why would they run their own Usenet archive? Google had the Usenet archiving business sewn up, and by the time they started showing signs of being untrustworthy it was too late and much of the 80s and early 90s stuff only exists in their archives. (Oh, and as a side note apparently a lot of the interesting porn from that era has been lost to history too.)

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#370

Post by makomk » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:43 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #357

bigiain wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody else did have a usenet archive - Google bought them, mashed up a bunch of other nn-usenet Google stuff into it, then let it bitrot until it was effectively useless, and then removed the only search features that worked... (Admittedly, if I recall correctly, Dejanews had already gone broke trying to maintain that archive before Google bought it, so arguably Google didn't kill it, they just bought the dying co…

And in the intervening years, no one running a news server thought to back theirs up, no one crawled Google and made torrents? This is software, not ancient manuscripts written by scribes on now crumbling vellum - there is no excuse for there to be one canonical copy of anything . Every pornographic movie ever made has multiple redundant backups on decentralized peer to peer networks and darknets. I understand the im…

Why would they run their own Usenet archive? Google had the Usenet archiving business sewn up, and by the time they started showing signs of being untrustworthy it was too late and much of the 80s and early 90s stuff only exists in their archives. (Oh, and as a side note apparently a lot of the interesting porn from that era has been lost to history too.)