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Bidding farewell to Google Code

google-opensource.blogspot.com

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Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#401

Post by Spooky23 »

hackuser wrote: post #44
baggachipz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be feeding here, but the lesson is that you can't count on things Google releases to be around very long. Even APIs for popular products, like Google Maps. Just don't expect anything they release to have a long shelf life. It's annoying and it sucks, and it is now laughable when they tag things with phrases like "free code hosting forever" and so on. For them to change, they'd have to either: 1) Support every…

> Support everything into eternity 'Eternity' overstates it. Plenty of vendors support projects long after they are obsolete. IBM supported OS/2, released 1992 and a marketplace flop, until the end of 2006. That means that if I need something to be around for awhile, I'll count on IBM and not Google. Google has the perogative to make that choice, of course, and long-term support generally is associated more with the…

Have you ever done business with IBM? They do the exact same thing, all of the time, except that it's software so you need to deal with migration.

When IBM buys a company/product, they will merrily throw everything out and declare that v.next is the next version of whatever product you are using. Then the legacy product goes in life support.

OS/2 lived on because it was widely deployed in banking for ATMs and POS, and it generated a lot of complimentary revenue. So when a company like Target had 100,000 cash registers, IBM got to sell services around deployment and maintenance, and management software like Tivoli to manage the devices.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#402

Post by innocenat »

frik wrote: post #251
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…

This wired article tries to rewrite the history: > rather geeky and sometimes unreliable internet site called SourceForge Wtf. SourceForge was for a long time very decent. It wasn't geeky nor unreliable, it offered CVS and later Subversion, web hosting, mailing list hosting, forums and downloads. GoogleCode itself was geeky with its very basic "Wiki", but it had a leaner "GMail style" UI, with only basic features so…

I haven't read the source article, but SourceForge at some point was real slow. Like, it would takes minutes alone to Log In at SourceForge, let alone checking out SVN repo. Accessing website hosted on SourgeForge was real slow too. I think during that year (not sure which year), tons of projects migrate either to Google Code or to GitHub. It was later that sourceforge improve.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#403

Post by nercury »

I was surprised to find my old project there from 2009: a simple lib for utf8 font rendering with OpenGL. I exported it into github, only to find that it never had any source hosted in source control - all my source was in a tarball inside "downloads".

I guess there are many authors like me who don't even remember they are hosting something there - it would be sad to loose all that code.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#404

Post by skagedal »

Moru wrote: post #391
eveningcoffee wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that Google Code hosts amount of code that is related to the research papers and are not actively maintained (many probably since uploading). This wast valuable resource will be gone forever.

Mabe someone will finally get it. You can't trust third-party sites to keep your stuff up. Host it yourself if you want to be sure it's around somewhere. Use free hosting as a backup plan.

Looking at my own and others actual behavioral patterns, I'd say the opposite is more closer to the truth. Dead links often go to someone's old server that they at some point probably planned to keep online forever. But you are of course right in that redundancy is a good thing!

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#405

Post by durin42 »

comex wrote: post #360
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

That's good to hear, although I'm not sure based on the comment whether: (a) a project's issues and wiki will be preserved in some form, in addition to the repo(s) themselves; (b) code.google.com links will be redirected to this googlesource archive (for projects which have not opted in to the custom redirect thing). If the answer is yes on both, then I'm a happy camper.

So for (a), we're going to build tarballs that include the issues, and wikis are already just in a repository.

For (b), that's not a bad idea, but I don't know if we'd talked about that. I'll poke it in our bug tracker. Thanks!

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#406

Post by blakeyrat »

SSLy wrote: post #337
blakeyrat wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would git-annex (avaiable on gitlab.com) together with vcsh and mod-organizer cover you?

I can BARELY figure out how to work Git itself, I'm guessing combining it with 3 other systems is not going to be a good idea.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#407

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

jdmichal wrote: post #45
gtaylor wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They kind of get a bad rap for this because of how large and visible they are. The funny thing is that many of the people here on HN have worked on projects that had very finite lifetimes as well, often closing them down for some of the same reasons. Someone has to invest the time and money to keep services running, even if only limping along. Google likes to experiment and test the waters. It's part of why they've b…

I also find a certain level of humor in the oft-espoused "release and pivot" ideology, accompanied with the pleas for mercy found in these Google product shutdown threads. What is different? Why is Google not supposed to release and pivot like everyone else?

Because at some point you stop being a feature of the landscape, and you become the landscape - or a big part of it, at least.

That's where GitHub is now. If GitHub closed in the same way, that would be... unfortunate.

That seems to be where Google Code was trying to go. For whatever reason, it never quite made it.

But if you're part of the scenery - and Google Code was, for a while - and not just a shack hardly anyone visits, a burden of responsibility goes with that.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#408

Post by blakeyrat »

eli wrote: post #365
blakeyrat wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does it? I dunno.

Honestly, I'll probably just download the archive and take it offline. I don't want to think about this shit.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#409

Post by sytse »

turingbook wrote: post #393
sytse wrote: post #57

Hi Chris, GitLab CEO here. What do you think about mentioning Gitlab.com as an alternative for people to move to? It has unlimited (private) projects and unlimited collaborators. It is based the open source GitLab project.

I think that GitLab should compete directly with GitHub in open source projects hosting area. Free open tier is powerful tools for letting more people know you. And for the whole community's benefits, we need another choice other than GitHub.

We agree, and the good thing is, we do! You can have public projects on GitLab, and projects like GnuTLS and F-droid are already there.

Re: Bidding farewell to Google Code

#410

Post by scanr »

I find the consolidation in repository hosting surprising. It feels like it should be the kind of ecosystem that supports lots of competing repository hosting providers that cater to various niches. This may be because I quite like bitbucket.
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