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by coffeeaddicted 5017 days ago
Yes, it is very user orientated. Offering users free software with access to sources for those which are interested. And well, for a lot of software that just makes sense. Maybe not for the kernel or for web-development, but a lot for typical desktop software. SF isn't just about source-hosting, it's about hosting complete projects including distribution of binary packages, allowing that projects use custom homepages (instead of scary source-browsing...) and even support for user (and developer) forums.

I don't think it's that hard to see that this is still preferable for many projects.
1 comments
astrodust 5016 days ago
You know what scary source browsing is? SourceForge.

http://gcmakefile.cvs.sourceforge.net/gcmakefile/

Seriously? That's the best they can do?

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coffeeaddicted 5015 days ago
It's definitely worse for reading through complete project code. For reading a single-file it's one click more than github which I can live with. It's very nice for getting a quick view on file-based changes, why and when someone did them and I use that interface a lot for that. I find it way easier figuring out file changes there than in github. SF is generally a lot slower (sometimes so horrible slow that browsing is near impossible). GitHub on the other hand sometimes freezes my browser when it has a lot of syntax highlighting to do (not sure if it still does, been a few months since I last run into that).

They have different ways to present code with different design targets and different problems. I prefer GitHub for reading code online without having to check-out, I prefer SF when already working with a project where I have the code locally and using the online interface to hunt for changes.

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