A Change to Google Code Download Service | Hacker News Reader

A Change to Google Code Download Service

google-opensource.blogspot.sg

55 pointsyeukhon35 comments

Right. So what code hosts actually still allow downloads, which are imho the best way to handle disciplined releases and to feed into package managers?

https://github.com/blog/1547-release-your-software

Okay, so you could tag your release in the repo and then add the result of `make distcheck` to the release afterwards, without having to check in things like configure scripts? That's not too bad.

Can't every version in Github be downloaded as a zip or zipball?

https://help.github.com/articles/downloading-files-from-the-...

Yes, but some people actually use GC to store other kinds of files, like documentation photos, documentation in PDF, etc. I think Github has stopped that and an alternative is Bitbucket (if you don't want to deal with sourceforge anymore...)

github offers free homepages, i use mine to host an installer for my github project

GitHub has removed the generic files section, but they have introduced some features for "releases" (basically, additional metadata associated to git tags) and that includes file hosting for release binaries. That should work for most use cases.

The original, Sourceforge, still does. Also, GNU Savannah.

Trouble is, a lot of Sourceforge sofware is bundled with adware these days, so anyone with sense won't download from them.

No, it isn't. There were a total of 3 projects (literally 3 out of 300,000+) that use the SourceForge adware download feature. These are the 3 (or was it 4?) that signed up during the test period before SF closed the program to re-evaluate it.

Other than that, there are open source projects on SourceForge that manually use adware installers of the publishers' own choosing (OpenCandy, Sweet IM, etc) to try to make money. But I've seen this on other services as well, since it's up to the publisher

I wanted to make a contribution to BASH recently and went about trying to figure out how, ending up at Savannah.

I don't know if I've just become spoiled by Github, I remember just mailing patch files in the past and being okay with it, but when I came across Savannah, nothing about it made me want to contribute. It turned me off completely and I moved on to work on something else.

Bitbucket

you can't host your binaries on S3 for like 5 cents/year?

Their recommendation isn't going to work for me at work. They actively block Google Drive/Dropbox/Skydrive/etc.

Well why do they that do that?

It's like complaining that Amazon can't deliver to you because you don't allow FedEx in your building.

I know some companies that just have a blacklist of services that can't be used (popular cloud ones); then of course you can use the N+1 clone of such services, until it gets popular enough for the IT dept to ban it. Eg: Dropbox & Drive are blocked, but maybe copy.com isn't.

IOW they block Drive not because they don't want people to download open source tarballs from it, but because they don't want them to use it for company files/docs.

How about they just ask their employees not to use it for company files? Or do they think their employees are idiots or not trustworthy? How do they think that reflects on them and their employees?

My experience is that, beyond some size threshold, people tend to stop caring about generic company policies because they don't understand them (nor they are well communicated or explained, since there is a large gap between management and employees) and just do whatever is handy to them. At the same time, management stop thinking that trust works as a way to enforce policies and start enforcing them technically.

Financial services companies have legal obligations to cntroll the ways their information is managed. Even in other industries there are some kinds if information for which legal restrictions and responsibilities apply to their storage and dissemination.

More like: they want to enforce the use of their own delivery service, because they don't trust FedEx.

But I don't get why they didn't block Google Code in the first place, given it is part of Google. Google Drive or Skydrive is probably the best alternative, depending on the corporate environment.

This was announced in May (as noted by the date of the blog post)

And it's good to remind again.

Ask HN: What problem triggered this?

People figured out that Google Code made a great file hosting site for piracy and Google didn't want to invest the resources to combat it.

But won't Google Drive have the same issue then?

Google Drive's free tier has (fairly low) daily download limits. It's not actually a suitable replacement for popular projects.

Yes, however there's a crucial difference which is that a Google drive account is attached to an individual, who then is the legal entity responsible for the download. All Google has to do is follow the DMCA and they are safe. Under the current arrangement Google appears to be the delivering the download themselves, putting them in the legal firing line.

Google Drive isn't nearly as public though, so it doesn't become searchable easily...

1)Another Google drive/plus account begging.

2) data control/access. Same reason they don't include sd card slots on nexus. They can't mine/ad adds on offline data. And google code was too hard to monetize (old system and all)

3) inside Google, engineers get big raises when they make their pet projects work (see mayer and gmaps) and abandoned projects can be fiddled by anyone. So abandoned gcode gets abused at will by prodigal gdrive rising star. Much easier to sell you added users to a project being monetized than to justify you added monetization to a project the press doesn't mention anymore.

When they say downloads won't work does that include the ability to use git/svn etc. on google code?

No, this is about downloads only. It doesn't affect cloning and accessing repositories with version control software, which continues to be supported as before.

So the project front page can just link to the source file raw url?

Bintray is a simple, smart and social binary distribution platform. Y'all more than welcome to try it.

Note that this announcement is from May 2013 but comes into effect for existing projects next month.

As for alternatives, SourceForge still supports binary downloads. Github introduced the feature this year as well.

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