One of my friends wanted to have a cheap SVN hosting (actually wanted to install svn to his hosting, but this part is irrelevant to what I am going to say). I offered him some alternatives including Assembla.
Then the topic came to OpenSource SVN hosting, and he believed SourceForge is superior to Google Code. While I can understand his claims, I have objections to it. As I am contributing to various opensource projects, and being an active user of opensource, I have a bunch of projects in my “OpenSourceProjects” folder. Most of them use SVN, rarely CVS. Most SVN projects was hosted under either Google Code or Sourceforge, some Codeplex.
To begin with, having used’em all, I have pretty much experience with both, at least as a user.
One argument that my friend used that SF has many features. Looking at google code interface, I have to admit that this is true. However, those blown features are not at my center of interest. When I develop the project, I want speed. SF doesn’t give me that much smooth experience, I remember having to update a project 5+ times just to download, and less frequently trying to commit 2+ times. Google, on the other hand, didn’t cause any problem regarding to its SVN usage.
Another problem that we faced recently is that the download counts of NHibernate.Linq project was shown as 0 a week after we released it. I am pretty sure (:) ) that it had thousands of downloads since then, but it is not seen on SF.
To sum up what I have said, I prefer quality of service over the features provided most of the time. Having features that I perhaps will never ever use is “relevant” to this story, it is YAGNI.
yagni