10 ms·

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

by cdibona 12y ago

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-microsoft-everyone-else/ 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 included, in favor of Github or bitbucket.

hsgeyfjw 12y ago
how do you (google) get away with being such asses? i know a bunch of developers will come to your defense, and say things like it is a free service, but it's not really, because for google, users are the product, and you guys have developed a rep for constantly shutting those users down. switching costs are very real, and people just don't trust you anymore. i don't care about google code in particular, but i hate google by this point. just hate you.
- baldfat 12y ago
  This is one service that needed to be shut down.
- gtaylor 12y ago
  Edit: The parent comment was flagkilled, but he was ranting about how Google should be expected to keep Google Code (and their other failed services) on life support indefinitely out of the kindness of their heart, because negative public perception. This is pretty ridiculous. It is a free service, sustained only by how long corporate wants to foot the bill. This is why it's so important to keep in mind how sustainable your dependencies are longer term (if having to move away from them would be such a big deal). Not only that, but Google Code lost the mindshare battle and hasn't been getting much development attention for some time now. It has fallen way behind, is now sub-par, and there has been a mass exodus of projects away from it. It had a nice year or two, but it's time to put it down. It's simple: Stop wasting developer manpower, money, and time on something that no longer offers much utility. Close shop, figure out how those resources could be better spent doing things that are useful.
  - f055 12y ago
    Although you are correct, it's more a matter of perception / PR image. If we are looking at Google that shuts down pretty popular projects (Reader, Code, and now G+ seems to be shifting) or pretty innovative projects (Wave, Glass) then how should we feel about becoming dependant on/involved in Google products? What if Gmail switches to paid-only model? What if the next-big-Google-thing will be closed down after a year, again? What if free Google Apps will close down, and only paid version exists? What's the point of getting involved into any free Google stuff? What's the point of using Google at all?
    - gtaylor 12y ago
      > Although you are correct, it's more a matter of perception / PR image. If we are looking at Google that shuts down pretty popular projects (Reader, Code, and now G+ seems to be shifting) or pretty innovative projects (Wave, Glass) then how should we feel about becoming dependant on/involved in Google products? You just listed a bunch of projects that failed to get traction or lost mindshare battles. I expect an innovator to move on from failures, which is what all of your examples are. Reader: Failure, Google Code: Failure, G+: Failure, Wave: Failure. The reasons for each failure differ, but said reasons are irrelevant to this discussion. The fact is that Google attempted something, maybe enjoyed a little bit of success, but the results didn't meet their expectations. Rather than continue running these things with skeleton crews (to what effect?), they've done the right thing and closed them down. The only exception is Glass, which was an experiment that already is impacting other current and future products. It never had a guaranteed future. It never reached consumer "1.0".
      - hackuser 12y ago
        > I expect an innovator to move on from failures That's great if you are an investor or employee, but if you are a user it kind of sucks. Google just needs to be up front about it (and maybe they are): We make no commitment to supporting this application or maintaining it as is. We might make radical changes, we might shut it down. If we do shut it down, we'll warn you at least 9 months ahead of time. I'm not going to invest much in those applications, but others might.
- itsbits 12y ago
  it was expected by many people..infact there was discussion about same happening... Why to run a project when it is not being used?..nothing bad in that...People are angry about Glass..not this..
- baggachipz 12y ago
  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 everything into eternity, which given their propensity to release new things frequently would grow to be impossibly expensive, or 2) Be more disciplined in what they release, so that it can be supported in perpetuity. I don't see either happening, so we end up where we are now. They have to keep innovating or they'll stagnate and die.
  - gtaylor 12y ago
    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 been so successful. I hope they keep killing off their underperforming/underused services so they can keep on pushing other things forward. However, closing down stagnant projects is very different from locking down access to previously open APIs (Google Maps). Since we're discussing the closure of Google Code, I won't get distracted with that controversial topic.
    - jdmichal 12y ago
      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?
      - gtaylor 12y ago
        It is puzzling, but I think their rapid ascension has led to some people setting their expectations for Google too high. Others seem to hold them to some golden moral standard (of their own design), for some reason. In the end, they are a for-profit business. Not a charity.
lloydde 12y ago
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.
- timgws 12y ago
  Consider it done. http://i.imgur.com/Xdmlj6v.jpg 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.
shubhamjain 12y ago
While true that no one uses Google Code. Every now and then, I bump into some obscure but a little useful project being hosted on Google Code. Maybe, makers of those projects have grown out of them and don't wish to put any more effort but still, there is a bit of value, I am able to derive from them. What will happen, if those projects are not migrated because their developers have simply forgotten about them?
- AnkhMorporkian 12y ago
  Perhaps archive.org will take it upon themselves to archive all the projects.
- btown 12y ago
  Someone needs to do an Internet Archive style project on all these repositories, put them up on Github, and make sure that they are indexed properly by search engines (i.e. intro pages become README.md, wikis are migrated, etc.).
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - nothrabannosir 12y ago
      Not at all, that's 100% the point of most open source licenses. Which are compulsory for a project on GC. E.g. MIT: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. Specifically, note "Permission is granted" and "distribute". Comply with those terms (i.e. include that piece of text when you redistribute) and you satisfy MIT. GPL, &c, they all have similar clauses. In fact, MIT goes much further. I could take all those projects, mirror them, and charge people insane amounts of money for it. If you can't even rehost on Github, what good would copyleft be?
mherdeg 12y ago
It sounds like Google hasn't committed to serving this content in any form past 2016. But there is a plan to provide archival-style info throughout 2016 (tarballs per project). Is Google in touch with someone like the Intenet Archive to make sure that these data are still available after Google stops hosting them? I'm sure there's some group that's willing to take on the work of hosting the project metadata and associated files. I personally, occasionally use a handful of "orphaned" libraries that haven't been touched in years and only live on Google Code. Gonna be a bummer when those links break.
raverbashing 12y ago
From the comments "What will happen to things that are hosted on google code, like jquery and the google font set? Thousand, if not millions of pages link to these directly - will they all be invalidated? "
- richardwhiuk 12y ago
  That's Google CDN, not Google Code, as the follow on comment says
  - raverbashing 12y ago
    Apparently it's called Google APIs or something https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  I hope those millions of pages are not linking into Google Code URLs, which are repos for developers. I don't think popular libraries like jquery core and fonts even have Google Code URLs. They should be linking into Google's Hosted Libraries, which are separate and will continue AFAIK: https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide
jnewland 12y ago
Hi cdibona! I'm primary on-call at GitHub today, and I wanted to say thanks to everyone that worked on https://code.google.com/export-to-github/ https://code.google.com/export-to-github/ and worked with us to load test it before this announcement. It's really cool to see so much work put into making it easy for folks to easily move their data.
wldcordeiro 12y ago
I had my hopes up that you guys would update Google Code to be more of a contender with GAE and Compute integration.
- cdibona 12y ago
  I have a secret desire to reuse the code domain in this manner.
  - oaktowner 12y ago
    Well...it was a secret.
lake99 12y ago
Thank you for taking questions. Can you give me a rough idea when you'll have the bitbucket migration tools in place?
dudus 12y ago
It's true that Google does not use Google Code for any coding project anymore, but it's still used as a support interface. For instance if you want to file bugs for AppEngine the official way is through Google Code https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list What are the plans on moving this and other issue lists for different Google products out of Google Code?
- ajessup 12y ago
  PM on App Engine here. We'll continue to be using (and monitoring) the Google Code issue tracker until we have a robust alternative available. We have plans for this, we're just not ready to talk about them yet.
  - dudus 12y ago
    Is this a plan just for AppEngine or for all other Google Products that use Code as an external Issue Tracker?
    - ajessup 12y ago
      Not sure about other products
eranation 12y ago
One thing that might be nice to do - if you see a project with high recent download stats (I'm sure there are a few) but their developers seem to have abandoned them, will you please do a courtesy backup to github, or perhaps notify people who starred it that the owners didn't mograte it to GitHub and the data will be lost unless someone does.
rogerbinns 12y ago
Please can you add a way for projects on google code to do a redirect to wherever they have gone. I moved all my projects late 2013, put notices on all pages I could etc, but still searching for the project often shows the google code site first. https://code.google.com/p/apsw/ https://code.google.com/p/apsw/ Google Code did one thing very well - each project could have one wiki and issue tracker, but any number of source code repos. This is fantastic for projects where there are multiple parts - eg an Android client, an iOS client, multiple server parts etc. Github for example only lets you have one source repository per project, and as a result the wikis and issues are useless since they are almost always filed against the wrong sub-project. Every startup I have been involved in over the last many years used Google for business (users, groups, office stuff etc), but then for code hosting we were forced to go elsewhere, needing yet another set of user accounts, groups, admin, billing etc. There was a ticket begging to let folks pay for google code, but it never came to pass. All the startups would have gladly paid, especially to avoid dealing with multiple accounts, sites and admin. Some features like the issue tracker were quite good. Heck you could even prioritise issues - something github still didn't have the last time I looked.
- tjohns 12y ago
  Google Code already has an option to flag a project as moved. From your project: Administer > Advanced > Project Moved For an example of what this looks like: http://code.google.com/p/iosched http://code.google.com/p/iosched
  - rossj 12y ago
    That's great, until code.google.com no longer resolves, at which point it won't help :( Would be nice if they used that info to automatically redirect to the new site.
    - Someone1234 12y ago
      They also should be returning a 301 and the new URL so crawlers can follow it and delete the old site from their records...
eveningcoffee 12y ago
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.
- Moru 12y ago
  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.
  - skagedal 12y ago
    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!
frik 12y ago
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 newer projects used it over SourceForge. "Bidding farewell to Google Code", that's a rather nice wording for closing down a web service. Please archive orphan open source projects to a read-only SVN/GIT repo or donate the data to archive.org. It reminds us that more open source projects should host the code on their servers, e.g. using Gitlab. In some years SourceForge and GitHub may get closed down too. Some orphan project of great value may get lost of the digital dark age.
- sytse 12y ago
  If any open source projects want to self host with GitLab CE we will be glad to provide free consulting to help them migrate and provide a free instance. Contact me at sytse@gitlab.com to get started.
- innocenat 12y ago
  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.
  - frik 12y ago
    Sourceforge was really good and as big in the open source world (between 1999 and 2006) like Github today. Later Google Code took over a larger part but never become as popular as Sourceforge or Github. Sourceforge is still used by many open source projects as download hosting provider (binary files). Google Code already stopped the download functionality several months/years(?) ago. Google Code was a 20% project created by Google devs in their 20% free-project-time, though it never improved beyond its first MVP stage, but was for many years very successful nevertheless.
rwallace 12y ago
As someone who used Google Code a while back (and did indeed end up moving to Github): it's a pity it had to end, but thank you for hosting it while it lasted. In its day, it was a service of unequaled quality.
jfoster 12y ago
What will happen to the bug trackers of large Google projects like android, chromium, app engine, etc?
boyter 12y ago
Hi Chris, Would it be possible to get a list of all the projects inside Google Code? I would very much like to grab the lot and preserve them inside searchcode.com Codeplex provides this sort of data and GitHub and Bitbucket have an API. I could write a crawler/scraper to do so but I would probably miss something. Please don't let this become similar to Geocities and have it all lost forever.
blakeyrat 12y ago
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.
- SSLy 12y ago
  Would git-annex (avaiable on gitlab.com) together with vcsh and mod-organizer cover you?
  - blakeyrat 12y ago
    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.
    - SSLy 12y ago
      I've just remembered that github does offer access to its repositories via the svn protocol. what aobut that?
- eli 12y ago
  Doesn't github provide svn access? Bitbucket too, I think.
  - blakeyrat 12y ago
    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.
    - eli 12y ago
      https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clients/ https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clie...
haosdent 12y ago
Would you migrate Chromium Project to Github?

by cdibona 12y ago

hsgeyfjw 12y ago

how do you (google) get away with being such asses? i know a bunch of developers will come to your defense, and say things like it is a free service, but it's not really, because for google, users are the product, and you guys have developed a rep for constantly shutting those users down. switching costs are very real, and people just don't trust you anymore. i don't care about google code in particular, but i hate google by this point. just hate you.

baldfat 12y ago
This is one service that needed to be shut down.
gtaylor 12y ago
Edit: The parent comment was flagkilled, but he was ranting about how Google should be expected to keep Google Code (and their other failed services) on life support indefinitely out of the kindness of their heart, because negative public perception. This is pretty ridiculous. It is a free service, sustained only by how long corporate wants to foot the bill. This is why it's so important to keep in mind how sustainable your dependencies are longer term (if having to move away from them would be such a big deal). Not only that, but Google Code lost the mindshare battle and hasn't been getting much development attention for some time now. It has fallen way behind, is now sub-par, and there has been a mass exodus of projects away from it. It had a nice year or two, but it's time to put it down. It's simple: Stop wasting developer manpower, money, and time on something that no longer offers much utility. Close shop, figure out how those resources could be better spent doing things that are useful.
- f055 12y ago
  Although you are correct, it's more a matter of perception / PR image. If we are looking at Google that shuts down pretty popular projects (Reader, Code, and now G+ seems to be shifting) or pretty innovative projects (Wave, Glass) then how should we feel about becoming dependant on/involved in Google products? What if Gmail switches to paid-only model? What if the next-big-Google-thing will be closed down after a year, again? What if free Google Apps will close down, and only paid version exists? What's the point of getting involved into any free Google stuff? What's the point of using Google at all?
  - gtaylor 12y ago
    > Although you are correct, it's more a matter of perception / PR image. If we are looking at Google that shuts down pretty popular projects (Reader, Code, and now G+ seems to be shifting) or pretty innovative projects (Wave, Glass) then how should we feel about becoming dependant on/involved in Google products? You just listed a bunch of projects that failed to get traction or lost mindshare battles. I expect an innovator to move on from failures, which is what all of your examples are. Reader: Failure, Google Code: Failure, G+: Failure, Wave: Failure. The reasons for each failure differ, but said reasons are irrelevant to this discussion. The fact is that Google attempted something, maybe enjoyed a little bit of success, but the results didn't meet their expectations. Rather than continue running these things with skeleton crews (to what effect?), they've done the right thing and closed them down. The only exception is Glass, which was an experiment that already is impacting other current and future products. It never had a guaranteed future. It never reached consumer "1.0".
    - hackuser 12y ago
      > I expect an innovator to move on from failures That's great if you are an investor or employee, but if you are a user it kind of sucks. Google just needs to be up front about it (and maybe they are): We make no commitment to supporting this application or maintaining it as is. We might make radical changes, we might shut it down. If we do shut it down, we'll warn you at least 9 months ahead of time. I'm not going to invest much in those applications, but others might.
itsbits 12y ago
it was expected by many people..infact there was discussion about same happening... Why to run a project when it is not being used?..nothing bad in that...People are angry about Glass..not this..
baggachipz 12y ago
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 everything into eternity, which given their propensity to release new things frequently would grow to be impossibly expensive, or 2) Be more disciplined in what they release, so that it can be supported in perpetuity. I don't see either happening, so we end up where we are now. They have to keep innovating or they'll stagnate and die.
- gtaylor 12y ago
  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 been so successful. I hope they keep killing off their underperforming/underused services so they can keep on pushing other things forward. However, closing down stagnant projects is very different from locking down access to previously open APIs (Google Maps). Since we're discussing the closure of Google Code, I won't get distracted with that controversial topic.
  - jdmichal 12y ago
    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?
    - gtaylor 12y ago
      It is puzzling, but I think their rapid ascension has led to some people setting their expectations for Google too high. Others seem to hold them to some golden moral standard (of their own design), for some reason. In the end, they are a for-profit business. Not a charity.

lloydde 12y ago

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.

timgws 12y ago
Consider it done. http://i.imgur.com/Xdmlj6v.jpg 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.

shubhamjain 12y ago

While true that no one uses Google Code. Every now and then, I bump into some obscure but a little useful project being hosted on Google Code. Maybe, makers of those projects have grown out of them and don't wish to put any more effort but still, there is a bit of value, I am able to derive from them. What will happen, if those projects are not migrated because their developers have simply forgotten about them?

AnkhMorporkian 12y ago
Perhaps archive.org will take it upon themselves to archive all the projects.
btown 12y ago
Someone needs to do an Internet Archive style project on all these repositories, put them up on Github, and make sure that they are indexed properly by search engines (i.e. intro pages become README.md, wikis are migrated, etc.).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - nothrabannosir 12y ago
    Not at all, that's 100% the point of most open source licenses. Which are compulsory for a project on GC. E.g. MIT: Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. Specifically, note "Permission is granted" and "distribute". Comply with those terms (i.e. include that piece of text when you redistribute) and you satisfy MIT. GPL, &c, they all have similar clauses. In fact, MIT goes much further. I could take all those projects, mirror them, and charge people insane amounts of money for it. If you can't even rehost on Github, what good would copyleft be?

mherdeg 12y ago

It sounds like Google hasn't committed to serving this content in any form past 2016. But there is a plan to provide archival-style info throughout 2016 (tarballs per project). Is Google in touch with someone like the Intenet Archive to make sure that these data are still available after Google stops hosting them? I'm sure there's some group that's willing to take on the work of hosting the project metadata and associated files. I personally, occasionally use a handful of "orphaned" libraries that haven't been touched in years and only live on Google Code. Gonna be a bummer when those links break.

raverbashing 12y ago

From the comments "What will happen to things that are hosted on google code, like jquery and the google font set? Thousand, if not millions of pages link to these directly - will they all be invalidated? "

richardwhiuk 12y ago
That's Google CDN, not Google Code, as the follow on comment says
- raverbashing 12y ago
  Apparently it's called Google APIs or something https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide
snowwrestler 12y ago
I hope those millions of pages are not linking into Google Code URLs, which are repos for developers. I don't think popular libraries like jquery core and fonts even have Google Code URLs. They should be linking into Google's Hosted Libraries, which are separate and will continue AFAIK: https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide

jnewland 12y ago

Hi cdibona! I'm primary on-call at GitHub today, and I wanted to say thanks to everyone that worked on https://code.google.com/export-to-github/ https://code.google.com/export-to-github/ and worked with us to load test it before this announcement. It's really cool to see so much work put into making it easy for folks to easily move their data.

wldcordeiro 12y ago

I had my hopes up that you guys would update Google Code to be more of a contender with GAE and Compute integration.

cdibona 12y ago
I have a secret desire to reuse the code domain in this manner.
- oaktowner 12y ago
  Well...it was a secret.

lake99 12y ago

Thank you for taking questions. Can you give me a rough idea when you'll have the bitbucket migration tools in place?

dudus 12y ago

It's true that Google does not use Google Code for any coding project anymore, but it's still used as a support interface. For instance if you want to file bugs for AppEngine the official way is through Google Code https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list What are the plans on moving this and other issue lists for different Google products out of Google Code?

ajessup 12y ago
PM on App Engine here. We'll continue to be using (and monitoring) the Google Code issue tracker until we have a robust alternative available. We have plans for this, we're just not ready to talk about them yet.
- dudus 12y ago
  Is this a plan just for AppEngine or for all other Google Products that use Code as an external Issue Tracker?
  - ajessup 12y ago
    Not sure about other products

eranation 12y ago

One thing that might be nice to do - if you see a project with high recent download stats (I'm sure there are a few) but their developers seem to have abandoned them, will you please do a courtesy backup to github, or perhaps notify people who starred it that the owners didn't mograte it to GitHub and the data will be lost unless someone does.

rogerbinns 12y ago

Please can you add a way for projects on google code to do a redirect to wherever they have gone. I moved all my projects late 2013, put notices on all pages I could etc, but still searching for the project often shows the google code site first. https://code.google.com/p/apsw/ https://code.google.com/p/apsw/ Google Code did one thing very well - each project could have one wiki and issue tracker, but any number of source code repos. This is fantastic for projects where there are multiple parts - eg an Android client, an iOS client, multiple server parts etc. Github for example only lets you have one source repository per project, and as a result the wikis and issues are useless since they are almost always filed against the wrong sub-project. Every startup I have been involved in over the last many years used Google for business (users, groups, office stuff etc), but then for code hosting we were forced to go elsewhere, needing yet another set of user accounts, groups, admin, billing etc. There was a ticket begging to let folks pay for google code, but it never came to pass. All the startups would have gladly paid, especially to avoid dealing with multiple accounts, sites and admin. Some features like the issue tracker were quite good. Heck you could even prioritise issues - something github still didn't have the last time I looked.

tjohns 12y ago
Google Code already has an option to flag a project as moved. From your project: Administer > Advanced > Project Moved For an example of what this looks like: http://code.google.com/p/iosched http://code.google.com/p/iosched
- rossj 12y ago
  That's great, until code.google.com no longer resolves, at which point it won't help :( Would be nice if they used that info to automatically redirect to the new site.
  - Someone1234 12y ago
    They also should be returning a 301 and the new URL so crawlers can follow it and delete the old site from their records...

eveningcoffee 12y ago

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.

Moru 12y ago
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.
- skagedal 12y ago
  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!

frik 12y ago

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 newer projects used it over SourceForge. "Bidding farewell to Google Code", that's a rather nice wording for closing down a web service. Please archive orphan open source projects to a read-only SVN/GIT repo or donate the data to archive.org. It reminds us that more open source projects should host the code on their servers, e.g. using Gitlab. In some years SourceForge and GitHub may get closed down too. Some orphan project of great value may get lost of the digital dark age.

sytse 12y ago
If any open source projects want to self host with GitLab CE we will be glad to provide free consulting to help them migrate and provide a free instance. Contact me at sytse@gitlab.com to get started.
innocenat 12y ago
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.
- frik 12y ago
  Sourceforge was really good and as big in the open source world (between 1999 and 2006) like Github today. Later Google Code took over a larger part but never become as popular as Sourceforge or Github. Sourceforge is still used by many open source projects as download hosting provider (binary files). Google Code already stopped the download functionality several months/years(?) ago. Google Code was a 20% project created by Google devs in their 20% free-project-time, though it never improved beyond its first MVP stage, but was for many years very successful nevertheless.

rwallace 12y ago

As someone who used Google Code a while back (and did indeed end up moving to Github): it's a pity it had to end, but thank you for hosting it while it lasted. In its day, it was a service of unequaled quality.

jfoster 12y ago

What will happen to the bug trackers of large Google projects like android, chromium, app engine, etc?

boyter 12y ago

Hi Chris, Would it be possible to get a list of all the projects inside Google Code? I would very much like to grab the lot and preserve them inside searchcode.com Codeplex provides this sort of data and GitHub and Bitbucket have an API. I could write a crawler/scraper to do so but I would probably miss something. Please don't let this become similar to Geocities and have it all lost forever.

blakeyrat 12y ago

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.

SSLy 12y ago
Would git-annex (avaiable on gitlab.com) together with vcsh and mod-organizer cover you?
- blakeyrat 12y ago
  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.
  - SSLy 12y ago
    I've just remembered that github does offer access to its repositories via the svn protocol. what aobut that?
eli 12y ago
Doesn't github provide svn access? Bitbucket too, I think.
- blakeyrat 12y ago
  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.
  - eli 12y ago
    https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clients/ https://help.github.com/articles/support-for-subversion-clie...

haosdent 12y ago

Would you migrate Chromium Project to Github?