project hosting … (for tinypy?!)
So I’m getting the feeling I should host tinypy somewhere greater than just in my blog. What a pity, the blog suited me so well. I dunno, I guess some people have unreasonable demands. (If I were feeling clever, I’d link all the words in that last sentence to other people’s blogs who’ve bugged me about this. But I don’t think there are actually that many.)
Anyway, my options are as follows:
- use the project management software I’ve written for my health-care company. Pros: I wrote it, so it must be better than anything else. Cons: I’ll have to maintain it when I find out otherwise.
- use google code. Pros: People know how to use it, and it’s pretty clean looking and they host it for me. Cons: I don’t get to host it. But I guess I could set up the first few pages of the tinypy site on my own server to make myself feel good.
- use trac or something. Pros: I’d get to host my whole project myself. Cons: I’d have to host the whole project myself and learn some new software and maybe set up some stuff.
So .. all my aimless thoughts aside, since this isn’t really about me. (If it were, I’d just blog about it every now and again and leave it at that.) It’s about you, since there is interest in the project it needs to be easier for people to poke at. What setup do you think* would be the best?
* it probably doesn’t matter what you think, because after writing this post, I think I’ve already made up my mind. Writing down stuff like this helps me think things through. But since you’ve bothered to read this far, you might as well put in your 2c.
March 29th, 2008 at 2:37 am
Trust me, use google code. I’ve hosted several projects there and find the administration of it to be trivial while the service is quite robust and flexible. I wish there were no project cap because I want to use it for everything that I do!
March 29th, 2008 at 4:46 am
Google code is great.
March 29th, 2008 at 5:54 am
Just use google code. It’s got everything you’ll need (including everything Trac does, better, without the hassle of having to maintain it, plus it’s free). If you want a pretty website do what we did with pyglet.org – cheap-as-chips pretty website with links to the tracker, wiki, svn, downloads, etc.
March 29th, 2008 at 7:23 am
Sourceforge?
March 29th, 2008 at 7:36 am
I vote Google code as well. It’s simple and familiar.
March 29th, 2008 at 8:35 am
I think you should host it on your own site, and just use email lists for everything, including bug tracking.
You do such a nice job of hosting your own website… why bother with google code? I think you’d gain more hosting the site yourself than being limited to how google code works.
Also google code puts ads on your site, which is quite unprofessional and tacky in my opinion.
… oops, I have google ads one of my sites… I really must remove them one day. But the google hosting doesn’t even give you the $0.30 a month you’d make off ads – it keeps that $0.30 for itself. If you’re going to be unprofessional and tacky, you might as well get the $0.30 a month for the ads.
I mean you’re probably going to host your own stuff anyway… and how much work is it? If it is too much work, then I guess google code might be worth trying.
seul.org does fairly nice hosting I think… maybe they’re an alternative? They’re people you can talk to, rather than a faceless web app. But why do web apps need faces anyway?
cu.
ps. trying to play devils advocate a little bit here… but I’m also a little drunk. Drunk on life. Or something else… or maybe… sorry for those reading this. Really… I’m sorry. You should stop reading this. Really. lalala. Are you still reading this? Stop it. Sorry.
March 29th, 2008 at 9:25 am
To the google code advocates – in what case is using something build in house / trac a better idea than using google code? If you’re doing something commercial, yeah. But with open source, are there any cases where you wouldn’t want to use google code?
March 29th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Another vote for google code.
I have hosted Trac myself in the past and it was a lot of work that I now get for free at google code.
Advantages of Trac that I can think of: better HTML (their wiki sytnax is a little bit richer), when you host Trac it means you also host a webserver so you can run CGI scripts, use apache’s access controls etc.
Trac allows you to hide more information (that is restrict access to some content). Google code will not.
March 29th, 2008 at 10:15 am
I manage a (currently) close source project on Trac. As I see it one of the major downsides to google code is that it prevents the community from maintaining its “wiki”. Only people with commit access can update it, which really removes the point of a wiki in the first place, which is to allow the community to build up its own documentation. Just look at Ogre’s wiki: http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki That could of never been built if the owner of the project has used google code to do the hosting.
Google code also lacks any kind of forum’s integration. I know some people shun forums, and like mailing lists instead, but forums are another tool to build a community that keeps an open source project going.
On the Trac side, I like that it can be made into an attractive main/developer site:
http://divmod.org/trac
http://developer.pidgin.im/
March 29th, 2008 at 10:31 am
I prefer forums myself. I don’t really like being on all sorts of mailing lists that send junk to me everyday. Forums are nice, you can check them when you want and if they have RSS you can subscribe to that if you want it to show up at your door.
March 29th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
You already have your own site. Just use trac, svn, csv, etc.
March 29th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Another cool thing with Trac is that you have more choice than svn for the revision control system, and lots of plugins.
March 29th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Use google code, it is clean, useful and gives you freedom to put your energy in something more creative than maintaining trac or something.
March 30th, 2008 at 1:10 am
Maybe google is a good choice, since i found I can access it fast. But for other sites, it does not(except sourceforge).
March 30th, 2008 at 5:49 am
Just to muddle the waters: there’s also launchpad.net. No, I haven’t used it for project hosting myself (although I recently decided to try out its bugtracker for a couple of my projects).
Trac has the unfortunate downside of having no spam filters in place, out of the box. Once the spammers discover your wiki & bug tracker, you’ll either have to manually keep cleaning it up (from the sqlite console, what fun!) or forbid anonymous access. Oh, another nice thing — trac has no built-in user registration.
March 30th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
I am currently hosting code on google, launchpad, and under two trac sites.
Trac is very nice as you can customize the look and feel of the site to a great extent, create custom bug workflows and there are spam filters you can set up. The problem is there are maintenance costs and you need to learn trac. There are plugins to get it working with HG and Bazzar. In the end it’s good for doing most things, but you do end up having to do a fare amount of work either bending to Trac’s ways or making it bend to yours.
Google code does one thing but it does it very well. It is very inflexible, when it comes to skinning, and you are stuck with what they give you. It’s SVN and no other option. Closing bugs via checkin comments is not supported yet. But it is very easy to hand off ownership of a project to someone else.
Launchpad is very nice, but there are caveats if you are developing on windows.
March 31st, 2008 at 6:16 am
At ProjectLocker, we offer very inexpensive Subversion and Trac hosting as well. Even if you choose a provider such as Google Code or one of our competitors, I’d recommend you go with hosting. Just because you’re good at it doesn’t mean it’s where you want to spend time (and by extension, money, since your time is valuable) maintaining and making sure everything is backed up properly. Let someone else worry about those mundane factors, be it us, Google, or someone else. Hosting will be your cheapest option.