Simo beat me to the punch in writing about this, After many long years being hosted on SourceForge, the Subtext submarine is moving into a new project hosting port.
We’ve finally moved off of SourceForge and onto Google Code’s project hosting. Our main site (primarily for end users) is still at http://subtextproject.com/ and I’ve hopefully updated every place it points to SourceForge to now point to Google Code.
Image stolen from Simo’s blog. ;)
This was a very tough decision between CodePlex and Google Code. CodePlex is a great platform and I really like what they’ve done with being able to vote on issues etc… They seem to be innovating and adding new features at a rapid clip. I host Subkismet, a smaller project, on CodePlex and probably would choose it for a brand new project.
My one big complaint with CodePlex is that we really want native Subversion access, not a subversion bridge to TFS. For example, I was able to run the svnsync command to get the entire SVN history for Subtext into Google Code. That’s not something I could do today with CodePlex.
One other thing I really like with Google Code is that it’s fast. When you go to our project page, and click on the tabs, notice how fast the transition is. Click on an issue and see how fast you get there. Make a change and save it and it just snaps back. I spend a lot of time triaging and organizing issues etc… so this snappiness is really important to me.
Another great feature I love is how well code review is integrated into Google Code. For example, you can use the web interface to look at any revision in our repository. Take a look at r3406 for example.
Click on the diff link next to each file that was changed. For example, the diff for AkismetClient.cs. You get a nice side-by-side diff of the changes. You can double click on any line of code to leave a comment. Scroll down to line 160 and take a look at a comment. Don’t worry, I was the original author of that file so I’m not offending anybody but myself with that comment.
So there’s a lot I’d love to see improved with Google Code, but I’m pretty happy with the usability of the site overall. It’s a far improvement over SourceForge where I started to viscerally hate managing issues and doing any sort of administrative tasks over there.
We’re now using Google Groups for our Subtext discussion list and we have a separate group for notification emails such as commit emails. I’m going to leave the tracker and file releases on at SourceForge for a while longer until we’ve moved everything over. Unfortunately, there’s no automatic import from SourceForge for bug reports. But if you’re interested in keeping tabs on the progress Subtext is making, feel free to join the groups.