Google Code Project Hosting


I've been playing around with Google Code Project Hosting for one of my smaller projects and it's pretty impressive. Project Hosting basically provides file downloads, a wiki, issue tracking and subversion.

The issue tracking is tag-based but with a little bit of structure to the tag to allow the tags to act like values of arbitrary fields. So far, this works well—probably the simplest way to get extensibility I've seen in an issue tracking system.

It does miss some features that I really like from Trac. There isn't an equivalent to the timeline to see project activity. There's no way to browse different versions of files or do diffs. Hopefully these features will be added in the future.

I'm not necessarily ready to move all my self-hosted projects there, but I'd certainly chose Google Code Project Hosting over SourceForge in an instant.

However, there is one major annoyance. Project Hosting requires you to have a GMail account, not just any old Google Account. This by itself would not be a problem, but it uses the Google Account system for authentication. So to use Project Hosting, you have to log into Google Accounts with your GMail address. This is very annoying if you use other Google services under a non-GMail Google Account. I find myself constantly having to sign out and sign in again, sometimes even just switching between browser tabs that are open on different services provided by Google.

The original post was in the category: software_craftsmanship but I'm still in the process of migrating categories over.