Make quick fixes quicker on Google Project Hosting

Have you ever noticed a bug or typo in your code but not been in a position to fix it? Perhaps you were browsing the code online from your Cr-48, or perhaps you just didn’t have Subversion or Mercurial handy. Today the Google Project Hosting team is announcing a new feature for you: the ability to edit your source code files directly in the browser, in our online editor powered by CodeMirror. Just look for the “edit file” link on files in the online source browser:As you edit, you can preview the diff of your changes so you know exactly what you are committing:

And if you don’t have commit privileges to the project? No problem. Instead of committing your changes, you can file your changes as a patch in the project’s issue tracker.

By lowering the barrier to entry for everyone — project members and users alike — we hope to make it easier for projects to grow and improve. Enjoy!

By Jacob Lee, Google Project Hosting Team

Introducing Project Hosting comments by email

Google Project Hosting is all about helping software developers work together on source code, code reviews, issues, and wiki pages for technical documentation. In fact, the projects we host have collectively accumulated several million issue comments. Working together means that, from time to time, the ball is in your court and you need to respond to other users.

We send out notification emails to let the appropriate users know when an issue has been entered or a comment has been added to an issue, wiki page, or code review. These emails contain a link that allows you to enter your response in your project on code.google.com/p. But starting now, we are making it much easier and faster to respond to these comments by processing email replies that you send us.

So, check your inbox for new notification emails sent directly to you. When you see an email footer line that says that you can reply, just press the reply button in your email client, bang out a thoughtful response, and hit “Send”. Project committers and owners can even update an issue’s status and other values via email. For example, to let your teammates know that you are working on an urgent defect report that just came in, reply with:

Subject: Re: Issue 123 inyour-project: data loss when src == dst

Status: Started Owner: your-email-address Label: Priority-High Thanks for that detailed defect report. I never realized that we needto handle that case specially. I’m going to add a check for itright now.

Please try it out the next time you receive a notification email. If you have questions, see our documentation on inbound email and user groups.

By Jason Robbins, Google Project Hosting Team

License Evolution and Hosting Projects on Code.Google.Com

Nearly 6 years ago when we first started thinking about doing project hosting on code.google.com we noticed something particular about the other open source project hosting sites. They either accepted all Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved licenses, like Sourceforge, or they only accepted one, like the Free Software Foundation's Savannah project, which only accepted GPL'd projects.

In our day-to-day work looking after open source licensing, we lamented the proliferation of licenses and decided that we would split the difference and only offer a very limited subset of the approved OSI licenses choices to our users as a stand against the proliferation of the same. You see, we felt then and still feel now that the excessive number of open source licenses presents a problem for open source developers and those that adopt that software. Thus when we launched project hosting on code.google.com, we only launched with a small subset of licenses.

This was hardly a barrier to adoption. While there were some complaints from some corners, in the intervening 5+ years since then, we've grown to become one of the largest hosts while allowing that ethic behind license choice to persist.

What's changing and why change now?

We've added an option to the license selector to allow any project to use an OSI approved license. Simply select “other open source” and indicate in your LICENSING, COPYING or similar file which license you are using.

Public domain projects are still only allowed on a case by case basis, as true public domain projects are quite rare and, in some countries, impossible. We encourage those that want to truly ship public domain to look at how D. Richard Hipp does things around SQLite and emulate his style. Email google-code-hosting@googlegroups.com if you’d like to request that license be applied to your project.

(Please note: we will continue to hunt down and kill non-open source projects or other projects using Google Code as a generic file-hosting service.)

Why change now? The TL;DR version is that we think we've made our point and that this new way of doing things is a better fit to our goal of supporting open source software developers.

The longer form of the reason why is that we never really liked turning away projects that were under real, compatible licenses like the zlib or other permissive licenses, nor did we really like turning away projects under licenses that serve a truly new function, like the AGPL. We also think that there were inconsistencies in how we handled multi-licensed projects (for instance: a project that is under an Apache license, but has a zlib component.)

To rectify this, we decided to add an additional option to the license selector that would accommodate some flexibility around open source licenses. We hope you find it useful and look forward to seeing how you use the site!

By Chris DiBona, for the Project Hosting Team