Greg Stein announced today a new Google Service in his talk in OSCON: Google Code Project Hosting (they need a shorter name), a hosting service of collaborative development enviroments featuring:
- Project workspaces with simple membership controls
- Version control via Subversion
- Issue tracking
- Mailing lists at groups.google.com
Obviously this is direct competition to Sourceforge.
Now, Sourceforge has has been suffering some problems for years:
- Downtime
- A very cluttered interface
- A search feature that just doesn’t work
Google Code Project Hosting is based on Subversion on Bigtable (instead of filesystem or BerkeleyDB) and features a trac-like issue tracker (written in Python!).
The interface is google-like of course: very simple and without creeping featuritis. There aren’t many projects yet in the system to test the search feature, but since searching is Google’s main strength I bet it will be better than Sourceforge’s.
Google already provides a great mailing list service in Google Groups and Code Hosting can send issue-tracker and SVN commits to the list of your choice.
Is it a Sourceforge killer?
No. It aims, at least at the moment, at different audiences. Google doesn’t offer shell accounts, tarball hosting or compile farms like Sourceforge does. The thing is most projects don’t make use of these features, so I guess lots of small-to-medium sized projects will flock from SF to Google once the dust settles down. For the larger projects, Google’s solution just doesn’t fit (yet).