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Comment by kyrra | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to see the progression of public source control hosting. SourceForge was the goto place for many years, but it's really only used for hosting large binaries at this point, and very few people host code there. Google Code started to steal some people away from SF, but again it was more focused on project hosting then just getting code to people.

Github is interesting is that the code is shown front-and-center whenever you visit a project page. Sure there is the Readme.md and wiki stuff you can do, but it makes browsing code and project discovery very easy. Github also made project creation and management super easy and lightweight. The number of questions you need to answer to setup a repo is so minimal. It gets out of your way when setting up a project.

I still feel like Google Code has some things going for it. The biggest being it's defect tracker compared to Github.

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I actually don't feel like having the code at the top is helpful for me. I rarely look at code on github. I go to a project page and scroll down past the code to read the readme. That happens easily 37 times out of 38. Yea, I made up those numbers. I know there's been a few times I've clicked on the code but it seems so seldom I'd much rather the readme was front and center and there was a "code" button/tab.

If the project sounds interesting I download it and look at the code locally. The few times I look at the code online is in response to like a stackoverflow question if I don't have the code locally already and I want to look up something.

But that's just me. It's not that big a deal for me to scroll down. If everyone else goes to code more than the readme under it then fine

Bitbucket shows you the README followed by a list of recent commits on the front page of a project. I have grown to really like their UI as a whole, although both github and bitbucket suffer from placing the clone URL in a tiny little box that's incredibly annoying to actually use.

I find that casually overlooking the root directory very often gives me a good estimate of how active the project is (and in which subdirectories it’s been worked on most recently) and also (very superficially) how clean the code base is (e.g. are there falsely committed backup/swap/a.out files even in the root dir). Of course, in most cases I’d immediately scroll down to the readme.

Unless, however, I really do want to view a file online (say because I want to check the API of some command I’m using and it is not documented otherwise) in which case I really appreciate that it is so easy to find. I really don’t understand why most other web frontends (Bitbucket, Gitweb, GitLab) make the commit log the first thing to see on the summary page. These mean nothing to me from an outside perspective.

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