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Comment by sussman | Hacker News Reader

(Speaking purely for myself here.) I agree the code is important, but I think a cohesive project is more important. Github presents itself as a giant pastebin for code, with "projects" bolted on. Google Code presents projects first, and puts the code at an even level with every other part: bugtracker, downloads, wiki.

(That said, I agree pull requests would be cool.)

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That's the problem with Google Code, in my opinion. It tries to be both a landing page and a project manager for my software when I'd rather take care of the former myself. It ends up sucking at both, unfortunately.

check your .html files in to your repo and serve them from projectname.googlecode.com. You can even set your project homepage to redirect there automatically if you are clever.

Same can be done on github. I can even do a cname redirect on a bare domain.

When a user thus opts for this functionality what then is the differential factor in comparing it to GitHub?

very little, clearly.

both can host project homepages in a variety of ways. GC gives you a navigable and clean and usable project landing page by default, while github makes you work a bit harder. neither service prevents you from doing what you want, but if you care about your non-developer users, you'll find better conversions using google code. fact.

to the OPs point, there is no reason why you can't make your GC project page have more content for developers. it is a wiki. everybody loves wikis.

the OP of this thread is clearly trolling, though.

I think I'm going to make a module to help people with GitHub repos create a friendlier layout for non-developers.

While I agree with you on the facts of projects vs code, I actually LOVE that the PROJECT isn't on github. It makes the wily nilly use/patches from 3rd parties so much easier. It makes Google Code feel a little too sourceforgey.

- Basically the front page of any google project is like the readme in github or bitbucket. Some repos use github pages for a full site. This makes it like a google code site and better as you can actually host content.

-Issues? Github has that. -Wiki? Same.

I don't see anything feature wise that Google brings to the table that GitHub or Bitbucket doesn't out of the box or manually with even greater control.

I really want to understand what the issues are, help me understand.

my take on it is that gc is better at running long-lived projects or projects with non-developer users. github is great, but its emphasis is strictly on coding and dvcs.

i've run svn gc projects, and projects on github, and found the gc stack to be generally more robust, cohesive, flexible, and methodically designed. ex: compare the rich functionality of the gc issue tracker to github and you'll find them incomparable. or, create a project and browse the "advanced" tab of your project and you'll probably find you have more control than it feels like, with little effort.

regarding "can actually host content" - prolly a red herring because both let you host content. they just present a different ui for it.

I think what he means is that you can actually design a site for your project and host it on Github. For example:

http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Are there any non-google sites that do this on google code? As far as I can tell, all of them look like this:

http://code.google.com/p/waf/

Which is fine, but I'd hardly say that a new user would find that less daunting than the Homebrew page. There's a lot going on, and it's trying to cater to both people who want to use waf and people who want to work on waf.

yes, you can actually design a site for your project and host it on google code. directing your users to the gc-provided default is your choice.

the contents of your repositories are hosted available at projectname.googlecode.com, and you can serve HTML just like you can code. example: http://json-template.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/On-Design-...

the urls are not as nice but github's aren't great either.

Thanks, I didn't know that. They should publicize that feature so that more projects use it.

I still find Github's detached gh-pages branches to be really clever and convenient.

Agreed, and yet implementing the features that make Github (& Bitbucket) what it is doesn't sound terribly difficult, and most importantly won't ruin the other "project-y" features of Google code.

Personally my projects are still on Google code, but Github is becoming more and more tempting.

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