Monday, April 23, 2007 10:35 PM
I've mentioned my
woes regarding
CodePlex before, but today takes the cake. I normally don't rant here because nobody wants to hear it...including me
...but I think this is probably worth mentioning.
*On a related note, special thanks here to
Patrick Veverka who turned me onto
DevJaVu for project hosting. I just started a project there in the past few days and so far it looks
very cool.*
As I mentioned before, I have a project on CodePlex that I haven't been able to connect to recently. Well, today after trying again, I went to the source code page of my project to download a snapshot just so I could work against it.
This is what I was greeted with...
Yup, No Change Sets in Source Control. Imagine logging into a project you've worked on for the past few months and seeing that little gem
. At first, I thought it was just a server hiccup. Maybe a glitch on the site. Surely, some reasonable explanation. Then I noticed the server name....tfs02. My project was on tfs03. What's this? Curiosity got the best of me and I did a google search...looks like CodePlex lost a server a little over a week ago and the projects on tfs03 had to be moved to tfs02. How did I find this out? Only by sleuthing on google, I eventually found a post on the CodePlex wiki and an MSDN forum post instructing you how to trick your source control client to looking at tfs02 now.
Let me be clear. I'm not angry that the server went down. Things happen, hardware fails, and we all have problems beyond our control. That's completely understandable. I'm not even
that upset that they lost all of my code! I mean, yeah, I'm a little shocked that there apparently wasn't a backup system in place...but you know what, CodePlex is a free service. They've provided complete source code hosting along with one heck of a website and never asked for a cent in return. So, I really can't hold it against them.
What bothers me is the way I found out. I had to 'happen' to notice that the server name had changed and then make a few trips down google. If I hadn't, I would have still been looking for my code for god knows how long. I didn't receive an email telling me that a server had gone bad. I didn't receive an email telling me that my code had been moved. I didn't even receive an email telling me that my entire version history had been lost. Nothing. It was left up to me to discover it. Granted, I did find the wiki post I mentioned earlier...but only after googling for the specific server names and "CodePlex".
So, with that said, I have moved to
Google Code. I'm not sure if it will be any better, but I have nothing to lose now. My version history is gone so there's no penalty for switching project hosting. I'll keep you posted on how it goes this time around.