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I need a little bit of help deciding which project host (if any) to move our currently existing project to.

We currently have an SVN (but willing to migrate if necessary) closed-source project existing on Assembla. We're wondering about moving because we want to open source our existing project and:

  • We don't have the resources to actively promote our now open source project, and suspect that the project hosting we select might influence how our project is publicized. If we move from assembla to github, how likely is it that our project will get more attention?
  • We want it to be as easy as possible for new developers to pickup and start running.

Our project is also going to need very extensive wiki documentation, as it is a very complex enterprise web application framework (somewhat similar to spring). Does it make sense to put that documentation at the same place as our repo host? Or should we have a separate website for that? We also would like to have a blog as well as a forum. Same question for those.

Help?

Ring
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  • have you checked out google code hosting (it supports SVN, and includes a wiki so may be an easier move). ā€“ Steve Robillard Jan 12 '12 at 03:33
  • Yes, I have, but their wiki seems far from feature complete. In addition, github seems to me to be the ideal choice since it has an easy importer for SVN projects, in addition to extremely easy project forking. I was thinking of suggesting simply creating a website for us, and not using any wiki/blog/forum from our project host (since they all seem feature incomplete) ā€“ Ring Jan 12 '12 at 04:02
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    @SteveRobillard - GŠ” have also extremely small repo-size and weakest tools set ā€“ Lazy Badger Jan 12 '12 at 04:55

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I think your project would get more attention being on github or bitbucket and developers would be able to easily clone from either host using git. With that said, you could try to promote it on sites like Hacker News.

Since your wiki would be very complex, I think a seperate website would be more suitable.

flynfish
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We don't have the resources to actively promote our now open source project, and suspect that the project hosting we select might influence how our project is publicized.

Might - and might not. You can see a lot of solo-projects on any source-hosting

We want it to be as easy as possible for new developers to pickup and start running

Assembla is very good choice in this case. Do not be in a common disease Git-mania. Really "big community" in case of Github is just common marketing cheating, no more - it's not your community

Assembla have most needed (for big complex project) tools, compared to competitors. Pull requests on Github implemented better, yes. But I can't recall any other advantages. Support of almost all modern widely-used SCM (except Bazaar) is big plus also.

Around community size: Assembla have big plans of expansion to million users in nearest years (two, AFAICR)

NB: You can think about changing SCM to (some) DVCS - forking|merging are more natural in these systems and it will give one more level of freedom to contributors without big headache for any side

Lazy Badger
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