Choosing a F/OSS repository site for a small project? (SCM-agnostic)

Question

I'm working on a project I expect to make public, and I'm aware of several F/OSS repositories I could use to release it - Sourceforge, Google code, and github. (Of course info about others is very welcome.)

However, it seems that the biggest differentiator between them is which SCM they use, and that's something I'm entirely agnostic about - mainly because I'll be releasing the project in a fairly complete state, and I don't expect any major forks or large patches. (I do expect some tweaks, and revisions to stay current with a complementary project.) Also I'm simply not very religious about SCM.

So apart from whether they use SVN or git, etc., which features do you find to set one F/OSS repository above the others? What I'm hoping for is something reasonably easy to use, but especially something that makes it easy for other users to contribute bug reports and tweaks. Also I expect maintaining documentation to be a bit of a chore, so features supporting that would be great. My docs are automatically generated, JavaDoc-style, so for example a web interface that required me to upload all those dozens of files individually would be a big hassle.

One feature I don't need, however, is easy distribution of binaries, as my project is not in a compiled language.

Thanks!

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Note - I expected to find lots of questions on this already, but everything I found was geared towards private repositories. If you find any good dupe questions with info comparing F/OSS repositories, please comment 'em in.

Answer 1

I recommend the CodePlex because I feel like their site is fairly clean and generally has the features I'm interested in. Judging from their FAQ, it looks like they use SVN for their SCM. What I think sets them apart (and I just found this out) is that apparently they run Team Foundation Server, so you can connect to the project right from Visual Studio and have all of your built-in SCM and bug-tracking and whatnot. This obviously is dependent upon you using Visual Studio.

Mostly though, it feels more solid than say, SourceForge, and you don't have to deal with the advertisements and stuff. I'd compare it to Google Code, but I don't really know much about it.

Just my input. Probably not relevant to you since you said something about JavaDoc, and that must imply you aren't using Visual Studio, so you won't be enticed by my big "they've got TFS!" selling point :P

Answer 2

This is a actually a duplicate of lots of questions here, but I thought it worth pointing out that Google Code is now supporting Mercurial (as well as Subversion) for all it's users. GC is very easy to use and would fit your requirements perfectly.

Note that almost all the questions regarding private repositories are actually covering public ones. To find questions on SO, the best bet is to use the site: feature of google, so try googling for:

site:stackoverflow.com open source repository

and similar.

Answer 3

One advantage of Google Code is that just about everybody has a google account, so the barrier of entry for people to log issues and otherwise participate is low, as they wont need to make and account, verify email, etc, etc, which they probably wouldn't bother to do just to lodge an issue.

That was the main reason I decided to use Google Code in the end.

The one thing I'm not sure about, and would be interested in is how to host your javadoc-styled documentation. I had thought you could perhaps just put it in your source repository but when you try and view the file via the "View raw file" link, it returns a content type header of "plain/text" which brings you undone.

UPDATE: Looks like I was wrong about it always returning "plain/text". For SVN repositories at least, if you set the svn:mime-type property it will work for you. See here for an example (then click "View raw file" to see it in action). Not sure what you do in the case of a mercurial repository yet.