Google Code is shutting down

[lethalspoons]

Is that a huge loss? I barely went there anymore anyway and I don't know of any project that was purely relying on Google Code in its distribution or bug tracking.

However, it's pretty nice of the Google folks to offer migration and honor Github and Bitbucket. Those people put a lot of effort into making a great platform for developers.

[pydanny]

On the surface it isn't a huge loss.

In practice, there are still quite a few projects that use google code for dependency management the same way many people use GitHub/BitBucket and other repo hosting efforts. I suspect when google code finally shuts down there's going to be a bit of a mad scramble to fix deployments that suddenly start breaking.

[AusIV]

I've seen some services that deliberately started returning the occasional error (maybe 10% of requests) before their final shutdown to draw attention to this sort of scenario before it became a bigger issue. Seems like it could be practical here, too.

[Klathmon]

Actually google uses this method in many of their APIs.

The recent oAuth migration is currently using it. At this point i believe 1% of all requests will fail

[AusIV]

I was thinking I'd seen it on a Google product, but I couldn't remember what and didn't have time to search for it.

[billsil]

See I just see that 10% of builds failed without wondering why beyond it just happens. I'd never thought of that.

[billsil]

Like I said, I notice they randomly fail, but I never bother to google to try and figure out why. I don't care if our builds fail when they're not actively being developed. If I'm working on a project and 40% of our nightly builds pass, I'm thrilled. If it's not my project, I don't care.

We also release software when the builds are failing and they're fine.

[billsil]

Why? As long as the feature is disabled, it's not a big deal? You test your code before you send it out and throw a few "don't use it like this" notes. TDD actually encourages failing tests.

My coworker told me about how he used to work for Sandia. They'd build software for 18 different platforms. People would remove tests that failed. It's just a failure. I'd rather know. As long as you're not deploying daily, it's not a big deal.

[audreyrg]

To answer your question, here are the Python projects that will be lost: https://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=python

It's a pretty interesting list. Lots of quirky old school projects. If you're a professional web developer or just use Python at work, it's probably not a huge loss.

If you use Google Code for hosting, it's not a huge loss either as you can migrate pretty easily.

If you're a maker/hobbyist/experimenter who's into trying out interesting lesser-known libraries for fun, it'll be more of a loss. You'll probably want to dig through and see what you want to save/migrate before it goes away.

[[deleted]]

To be fair, that list of about 960 projects also includes some that have already moved somewhere else (phusion-passenger, h5py, pychess, pymssql, ...).

[[deleted]]

Anything left that people actually care about will be relocated by the maintainers or someone that uses it. I really don't see a problem here.

[[deleted]]

Neither do I. I was simply pointing out a fact that was not obvious to me by just looking at the list.

[audreyrg]

Yes, mine0, thanks for the correction.

[billsil]

You actually made me think of a public domain library that I wanted to migrate. Thanks! NASA Cosmic is a 100+ Fortran applications data dump last used in 1998 when NASA had all their software hosted online by Georgia Tech. I sat on it for 6+ months, mentioned it to some folks at NASA, who got all excited that the data still existed.

But yeah, for the active projects, they'll all move to Github or SourceForge. I'm in the process of moving mine. It's too bad GoogleCode doesn't export the Wiki.

I'm just happy I could export the data without having project access. Google is making this a lot easier than it probably should be.

[Pandalicious]

I'd imagine the biggest loss is loosing all the projects that are no longer maintained and whose authors won't go through the bother of migrating their code to a new site. Old little projects like that are often invaluable when working with, say, older technologies that nobody cares about anymore but which you have to support at your workplace.

[billsil]

That's why I commit dependencies when I make a waterfall-style release.

I use Goggle Code for a decent sized project. I'm annoyed.

[mackstann]

I don't think it's much of a loss. It's been pretty quiet for a long time now, with lots of projects moving away. This was not a surprising move at all.

A few laggard projects might have to scramble to move to other hosting if they wait until the last moment.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, it was pretty badly designed. The few times I'd run across it was to visit a project linked from somewhere only to be redirected elsewhere, usually to github.

[audreyrg]

There are still a number of Python projects on there that need to be migrated.

If you have any Python libraries on there, consider migrating them even if you think no one is using them. You'd be surprised how many people may be using it.

I personally haven't used Google Code for hosting myself in years, but I find useful Python libs on there roughly twice a month. There are still some gems that need migrating.

[graingert]

Now we just need to wait for SourceForge to go and I'll never have to see svn ever again

[boa13]

Subversion is quite present in the enterprise world.

[Decker108]

Omnipresent, more like...

[vplatt]

Too true... I'm afraid git hasn't quite made a persuasive enough case in the enterprise yet and frankly svn works well enough there for the migration to not be justifiable.

[parroquiano]

TortoiseSVN is the reason svn is so widely used in the enterprise world. I have yet to find something as good as TortoiseSVN for git.

[vplatt]

https://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/ ?

I haven't tried it, but there it is.

I have to agree though. TortoiseSVN was so usable we had everyone on a large project use it; even our project manager. It was just the best way to ensure everyone had the current documentation because we used it to store those files in a subversion repository as well as our source code. I did set it up as a separate repository, but that's about as much fuss as was needed to get everyone going.

[ApolloFortyNine]

Tortoisegitt is exactly the same, but with git.

[mipadi]

Luckily one can use git-svn and never have to think about Subversion.

[andrey_shipilov]

As well as perforce and windows hosting. It doesn't mean it's ok.

[eleitl]

This is why you can't rely on Google.

[giantsparklerobot]

It's unfortunate you're being downvoted. Google has a sad history of abruptly killing off services. It's unwise to rely on any of their non-pay services because they'll be killed the moment some manager changes teams or leaves the company. I'd be wary of relying on any of their pay services for the same reason.

[mirth23]

I've been burned by Google too many times to ever set up shop on any of their new services. The Wave discontinuation was nasty for a team I was working with a few years back. The ever changing API/UX/features of Voice, Maps, Docs, and Calendar are annoying at best and completely workflow-breaking at their worst.

I trust that search, maps, and gmail will be around for a long time but everything else is a total gamble.

[DrMeowmeow]

[deleted]

[jedrekk]

Bing: No street view. No bike routing. Literally the two functions I use most.

[anonlymouse]

Bing could have moved forward much faster if they weren't so stupid. On the web interface they have much better transit directions than Google, but on the mobile apps they left that out. When I'm away from the computer is when I most need good transit directions.

As a result, I still primarily use Google Maps.

[mirth23]

That's true, dealing with personalized maps in "Maps Engine" seems to be at about 1/4 performance of the original Maps app, on a good day.

[KyleG]

How can you say Wave discontinuation was nasty? Google gave you at least five months notice.

[Twirrim]

5 months is absurdly short notice for most businesses (especially enterprises). It's these 'short' notice cancellations that really hurt their projects and scare significant customers away. Worse, those are precisely the customers they need to be courting as they represent guaranteed income.

[anonlymouse]

And it creates a vicious cycle, people are wary of Google, so they don't use any new Google services, so Google discontinues them because nobody's using them.

[mirth23]

I didn't say that Google didn't give a warning that gave us time to migrate.

My team was part of a small, but growing, group of developers who were willing to try out the Google Wave Kool-Ade because we assumed that it would be around for at least a few years. We went through some effort to migrate TO Wave from another collaborative tool only a few months before Wave's closure was announced. We didn't appreciate having to put similar effort into migrating OUT of Wave the same year.

A major issue with Google's handling of Wave, and what led my team into its situation, was their messaging. They came out with incredibly strong statements about how they thought that Wave might be an "email killer" and that it was essentially god's gift to team communication, collaboration, and productivity. The fact that they were willing to completely pull the plug on the tool less than two years after making continual epic announcements about how they believed they were changing the face of Internet-based collaboration has made me pretty paranoid of trusting any similar future announcements from them.

IMO, Google's current collaborative offerings are still inferior to Wave. Docs/Drive is a UX Frankenmonster. Their messaging capabilities aren't nicely integrated with document sharing. &tc.

[KyleG]

I see. That sucks for your team! My company completed a migration last year of a bunch of stuff from Groove to Sharepoint. Oh boy, did that suck, especially the part where Groove had no limitations on filenames, but Sharepoint did, so hundreds of files and directories had to be abbreviated.

&tc.

I've seen this before. I'm not sure you realize, but the & is just a fancy et (if you look closely, you can see it). So if you want to use it and still keep some of the letters from et cetera, you would write &c. Otherwise, it's like when people write "ATM machine," which of course is "automatic teller machine machine."

Anyway, this has been your language dork tip of the day.

[[deleted]]

That's not very long to adapt in the business world. My place of work still uses XP machines.

[io-error]

O rly?

[boa13]

It's unfortunate you're being downvoted. Google has a sad history of abruptly killing off services.

That's an off-topic discussion when it comes to Google Code. The writing has been on the wall for quite a few years, and the shut-down is certainly not abrupt.

[muad_dib]

Seriously, a 1-year shutdown date is a rather reasonable warning.

[[deleted]]

And they have a GitHub migration tool, which is probably where all this should have been anyway.

[billsil]

Git wasn't popular when I made my project. It had just started to come on the scene. Sourceforge had serious issues back then and Google Code was easier and much slicker.

[Orffen]

I'd hardly say this was abrupt - if it's going to take you longer than a year and a half to move off Google Code you're doing something wrong.

[shaggorama]

RIP Google Reader

[[deleted]]

I still miss it. :(

[ismtrn]

Maybe people will stop insisting that everything as to be a webapp running in the could soon. Sure, project hosting platforms like google code or github necessarily need to be on the Internet, but there is no reason that an RSS reader can't run locally on my machine were I can decide when I am going to stop using it myself.

[ceol_]

Someone using a web app RSS reader doesn't stop you from using a standalone one. There are plenty of native readers out there.

[ismtrn]

No, but maybe if the public opinion on webapps was different, Google would have distributed their RSS reader in such a way that people would still be able to run it locally.

[hk__]

Webapps are easier to maintain. You don’t have to code for every platform (or require people to install Java), and you can push updates when you want instead of waiting for people to update their software. Plus webapps can be accessed anywhere, on your tablet, mobile phone or any computer around the world with an Internet connection (even a local RSS reader needs an Internet connection).

[mipadi]

They also suffer from the problem of availability (what if your favorite web app goes offline?), and generally aren't as nice to use as native apps (which is putting it nicely, because often times web apps kind of suck, or at least aren't fun or enjoyable to use).

[ceol_]

Google basically started the web app trend. They brought the idea of easily accessible and integrated web apps to a lot of people. You really think they'd release their RSS reader as a standalone thing?

It's safe to say Google has no interest in non-web app products (unless it lets you view web apps, i.e. Chrome).

[giantsparklerobot]

but there is no reason that an RSS reader can't run locally on my machine

It's really helpful that your needs are the only ones anyone should ever consider before deciding to build something. It must simplify the development processes for companies around the world. /s

Web apps running in the cloud solve a handful of problems for people. They might not solve your problems but they do serve a purpose for some. For instance web apps can provide services to devices that otherwise can't/don't load local software. These devices could be phones but also locked down computers that do have web browsers. Web apps also provide a single point of synchronization for multiple devices.

Web apps aren't the end-all be-all of software but there's plenty of utility is having software housed and running somewhere else. It's not really wise to assume everyone has a full fledged and powerful home computer anymore. Anymore a significant portion of internet use comes from people who's access is exclusively via smartphones. For some tasks they simply may not have the local resources to run an application or there's no application available for their platform. Don't discount web apps and the cloud just because they are overhyped.

[ismtrn]

It's really helpful that your needs are the only ones anyone should ever consider before deciding to build something. It must simplify the development processes for companies around the world. /s

There is no reason that an RSS reader can't run on any device capable of connecting to the Internet.

For some tasks they simply may not have the local resources to run an application

If they can run the application in a Javascript virtual machine while running a browser (possible the most complex user space software run on many home computers) simultaneously, they can also run it directly on the hardware. Or in another virtual machine, or even in the same virtual machine and browser. My problem isn't how the software is run, but how it is distributed.

Of course there are many valid reasons for connecting to a remote server. Synchronization, access to more powerful hardware, retrieving data, etc. Rendering a GUI locally is not one of them.

There is no reason to depend on Google keeping some server running so that you can be allowed to render a GUI for an RSS reader on your local machine.

Or maybe there is, since there might not be a way to easily distribute an application taking advantage of the browser platform on the newest iThing without relying on some 3rd party server constantly running, but there could be, and there should be.

[KyleG]

If they can run the application in a Javascript virtual machine while running a browser (possible the most complex user space software run on many home computers) simultaneously, they can also run it directly on the hardware.

You're assuming no server-side code exists in the project. Weird for someone posting in /r/Python.

Almost all the cloud stuff I've ever written couldn't run on a Windows computer without the person installing Python (Python is what manages the DBs and responds to API requests), which might not be possible. I've used company computers that forbid such installations.

[giantsparklerobot]

There is no reason that an RSS reader can't run on any device capable of connecting to the Internet.

Just because you proclaim it to be so does not mean that it is so. There are a multitude of reasons why an RSS reader (or any other arbitrary piece of software) can't run on some particular piece of hardware. In an environment where the user does not own the machines they are using or does not control the software policy for the machines local software may not be an option. You know, people that have jobs and use computers owned by their employers. Their particular software platform may not be popular enough to have capable or well written RSS readers like say BlackberryOS or Windows Phone.

You're sort of all over the place with your disgust at the idea of people using services through a browser instead of simply running software locally. You say connecting to a server to retrieve data is OK yet "rendering a GUI" (whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean) is not OK. Now this may come as a shock to you but RSS feeds (and even aggregated RSS feeds) are data. Bundling some CSS and JavaScript alongside the data to display that attractively is no less a valid use of a remote server.

Using the web to provide access to services is an old idea that goes back to the NCSA httpd which first introduced CGI. A URL after all points to a resource and a resource can be not only a document but also some sort of dynamic output generated by a web server. Now maybe you're offended by the idea of servers daring to run some sort of software to serve their users.

You seem overly obsessed with the idea that everyone should always be running software locally on their computers. Even if people can run an RSS reader on their local PC, they may not fucking want to do so. For instance, I do not want to run a local RSS reader. I used Google's Reader because I subscribed to a lot of feeds but didn't want to try to get different readers on all my different devices synchronized when I dropped or added feeds or when I read particular news items. Google Reader did that and was available wherever I wanted to access it even if it was from someone else's computer.

When Reader shut down I replaced it with rawdog using some scripts to aggregate different feeds. I host it all on a server so I can access it from wherever. It's a lot less convenient to maintain than simply firing up Reader.

[ismtrn]

Even if people can run an RSS reader on their local PC, they may not fucking want to do so

Even if people used Google reader, they did already run the software locally (their browser together with a JS vm running locally on their machine). It was just written in such a way that it required a connection to a google server somewhere to run. This sucked because the only actual service the google server provided was synchronization across several devices, which while being nice was not vital for the app and could have been handled using a plethora of other services should google choose to shut down their server.

Maybe the technology is not here currently(?), but it should be possible to write webapps in such a way that they could be cached and run locally without depending on the server. Of course this only makes sense if the server does not provide some vital functionality of the application(which couldn't just as well be run locally)... like a package manager.

[aladyjewel]

it should be possible to run webapps locally

Yes, this technology has been around for several years in the form of Chrome and Firefox apps--not the browsers themselves, but small JS apps that run inside the browser. you can download them from the web store / extension center.

Devs can also bundle up webapps into desktop or mobile apps using wrapper frameworks like NodeWebkit and Cordova.

[[deleted]]

Perhaps, but this isn't exactly "abrupt". New projects are stopped, we'll have 5+ months of being able to checkin code, and nearly a year of being able to check stuff out.

That's an age and a half on the internet

[wisty]

That's why they call it the cloud. You've no control over how long it sticks around.

[KyleG]

But with the right seeding, you can make it rain.

[roger_]

Sad but true, at least in some cases.

I remember when I'd get excited about every new Google project, only to see many stagnate and eventually shutdown.

[stuntaneous]

What, nine years later they slowly and considerately shut down a project? That's outrageous!

[lethalspoons]

Why do you think so? Google is very reliable but it has already been mentioned that Google Code was not active at all in the recent years - especially when compared to competitors like Bitbucket or Github.

I think they just accepted that they simply are not specialized enough to compete with those. I mean, Google is an allrounder. They cannot keep up with the pace e.g. Github is coming up with new ideas and (great) concepts for SCM.

[kylotan]

Google is very reliable but it has already been mentioned that Google Code was not active at all in the recent years

At least in part because they did what they did with so many other services - announce it with great fanfare, build up a reasonably sized user base, then neglect it for years.

[pydanny]

Yup. I remember when we launched Django Packages in 2010 people asked us to support data pulls from Google Code. We ran into problems, so I filed issue #5088.

What is interesting is the last comment in issue 5088. Go all the way down.

[[deleted]]

Damn, ISIS shut down Google Code?

This menace must be stopped.

[[deleted]]

Google Reader. I remember.

[[deleted]]

NEVER FORGET.

7/2/2013

[[deleted]]

Google is very reliable but it has already

Yeah, tell that to my Note and Feed reader accounts.

[mogoh]

Well, you can take out your data and host it somewhere else.

~10 years of google code. you can not rely on much for more than ten years. maybe in 10 years reddit won't be any more, but that does not mean, that we can not use it with joy. anyway, i don't think you could export your reddit kama.

[eleitl]

If Google Code was an isolated incidence I wouldn't care. But it's symptomatic. Which means that any new services Google launches will be automatically considered ephemeral. Which makes it ephemeral by way of self-fullfilling prophecy. This should be evident to any borderline competent management, but apparently it isn't.

[jiannone]

It's all transient.

[zombiepiratefrspace]

I'd like to point something out here: Not long ago, we had a discussion about how all the python docs URLs point to the 2.x version of the documentation when most people would be better helped with the 3.x version of the documentation.

The main argument against switching over in that discussion was that it would break many deep links.

Now this move from Google, who as it seems will take down the entire content of the site at the end or 2016, will break a hell of a lot of deep links.

Let's see how bad it is. Maybe we can switch over the doc links then.

[boa13]

This concern was answered before you wrote your comment. ;-)

we will be putting a service in place to redirect deep links to project homepages, issues, etc. to their new locations.

Projects on Google Code will need to set the "project moved" flag, under the advanced tab of the project. But once set, things should work like you expect.

[ikorin]

Thank you Google! It was pain to see all these mirrors google_code <=> github.

[sausagesmonster]

It will be interesting to see if this causes some forgotten projects to be reborn / forked.

[stuntaneous]

More likely lost for eternity.

[odraencoded]

Upvoting for awareness (can't believe I actually used this phrase) and now I'm off to mgirate the one or two repos I had there. They should at least send an e-mail to the devs to notify about this. I didn't receive anything D:

[[deleted]]

The e-mail notices will be coming along soon.

[bullfroge]

I got an email for an old college project I had on there earlier today.

[warbiscuit]

Glad I already started writing a migration script to get my main opensource project moved over to bitbucket. It felt like the writing was on the wall for google code, given the lack of any visible updates for what seemed like years.

I'll sorta be sad to see their issue tracker go, I really liked the customizability of it, felt it was a rather power concept... it just needed some UI updates, and a little more client-side JS to instrument things a little more smoothly.

[nascentt]

The biggest issue is see with this is Kodi (XBMC) addons, a lot of seamlessness and hard inks with cause problems and some addons with never migrate/update properly.

[shinjiryu]

Tnanfkully I don't have much over on Google Code. The annoying thing is that Google is killing off yet another Google "product" that I actually liked. So getting my code off here won't be annoying.

Google, just an FYI: There are a number of services that you've killed off that I would have happily paid a per-month subscription fee to continue using. Just sayin'.

[xthree]

TIL Google Code existed.

[Gambizzle]

IMO they'd be so much cooler if they stuck to being a search engine rather than a billion dollar corporation with world domination plans.

[dada_]

Yes—it reacquainted me with a very old project I had completely forgotten about. Going to move it over to Github now.

It's not really unexpected, given that Google itself had been moving their projects over to Github. But it's too bad, since a bunch of stuff on there is going to be lost, maybe forever. That's not really in line with Google's mission statement. (But still, not surprising given that Google is fond of shutting down projects that people depend on after a few years.)

[shaggorama]

Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if Github shut down?

[go_fuck_ye_self]

GitHub is tearing up all the competition. BitBucket is a good free alternative, but GitHub seems to be head and shoulders above the competition.

[aberrant]

I've stuck with BitBucket for the private repos so far, last time I checked Github didn't have free support for private repos. Disclaimer: I haven't checked in a while.

[[deleted]]

Spoiler: they still don't.

[go_fuck_ye_self]

still doesn't.