Can I host a mirror on github or googlecode, if the project is managed on codeplex.com? Should I?

Question

I have a project managed on codeplex.com.

Does it ever make sense to push source releases to github or googlecode?

Answer 1

Sure, if you want people who are using git or hg to easily grab your source code. Might not be worth it unless your project has a large user base, though.

Answer 2

Other than for exposing different source control options, I can't see why you'd want to (is it even realistic to co-manage a project with, for example, SVN and Git at the same time). If you're not doing that, it's a bit of a waste of time. What do you get out of it? A small measure of redundancy if codeplex is unavailable for some reason? What if someone commits changes to another host? Managing conflicts between different repositories is not fun. The inevitable end I'd imagine would be having a 'ghost' repository which many are unaware of being unofficial instead of having everyone working off the main one.

Answer 3

It used to make sense to have a read-only SVN mirror for its popularity, but now Codeplex supports SVN checkouts as well.

A different aspect is moving your source control to github / etc. instead of mirroring. You still keep one authoritative location for the code, but gain github's arguably better support for collaboration from others.

Answer 4

I don't know of any reason to mirror just the source code from your "home" site to another one, and having observed thousands of open source projects, I can't recall any of them having done that so I really don't think there is a reason for it.

However there are a couple reasons why people might want to mirror their project releases (e.g. the installer versus the source code). Here are the two reasons a project might want to do that (and I've definitely seen examples of both of these):

• Your project is multi-platform - CodePlex is the best place to reach Windows users, so if your software runs on Windows you'll get the most downloads by hosting your project releases there. However if your software also runs on Linux, very few Linux users look for software on CodePlex, so you might want to host the releases on SourceForge as well since it has a high number of Linux users.

• Your preferred site for development is different then the best site to reach your audience - The project development features vary between the sites, so take a theoretical example of you love using CVS but your project software runs on Windows. SourceForge is the only site that supports CVS, so you might choose to host your project there for development purposes, however you would likely also want to mirror the releases to CodePlex since you'll be able to get the most downloads from Windows users there.