Bear's Log

One of the bigger news stories from this year’s OSCON (well, at least from what my co-workers have said, I’m not there :) seems to be the announcement that Google has a new Project Hosting service. Looks very clean and simple so far but I am having trouble seeing what projects are already in it as you only are presented with the ubiquitous search bar and a “sample” of tags. Simply clicking on the “Search Projects” button with the search field empty gives you an error message instead of a chance to browse projects.

To check it out I went ahead and added my parsedatetime (yes, I renamed it) to the service and it was fairly painless. Not a lot of metadata available but the basics seem to be covered. You can add owners or members to your project and it also has an issue tracker - I’ll have to try that out later.

Once I added the project I then did an initial checkout of my new project but it seems the example URL they give you for the checkout pulls the trunk directory - probably a good default but I was wondering if they were going to allow branches/tags - all your normal SVN stuff. I clicked on the “Subversion Repository” link and did see that they are available so I took another look at the URL and noticed that they specified “trunk/” so after removing that I was able to get my project directory with branches/ tags/ trunk/ just as I like it.

Now that I saw a sane directory structure I copied over the current (0.6) version of parsedatetime and added it and did the initial commit. Everything worked and while it was a tad slow, it was no where near as slow as SourceForge’s and on-par with others like Berlios, etc.

It will be interesting to see how it holds up after it is slashdot’d and digg’d – but I’m also wondering how many people move from SourceForge to Google. I’m not expecting a lot as Google doesn’t have many of the features that SourceForge has (home page customization, filespace) but I’m sure there will be a minor stampede :)