There are a lot of sites where you can host and/or promote your code for open source or free software project. Some just host the files and some just describes the project and links to another file hosting. Of course there are websites which do both.
Whether you are in to Git, subversion or another revision control system, the hosting site of your choice may differ. A bug tracking system or a wiki may also be feature that you cannot live without. There are SourceForge, Opendesktop.org, freshmeat.net, Google code, Github and (of course) Gitorious, just to name a few.
So which one do you use and why? Or maybe a combination of several sites?
I used sourceforge because that was the main player at that time, the others didn’t exist yet. (BTW freshmeat is not a code hosting site, it’s just for announcements and tracking releases).
Which one I pick for a new project now would depend on the audience, usage pattern, the code management system, and the website facilities. So I couldn’t say ahead of time. I wouldn’t hesitate to use different ones for different projects.
I like SourceForge. It has a lot of good software and many of them are well known applications. I think that it still is one of the most popular code hosting sites. It has also a decent browsing feature.
Regarding Freshmeat, I think of it as a “promoting site” where you can browse software. The code might be hosted on a different site but it is nice to have a place where you can search for software in an easy way. As an example, I think it is difficult to find applications at Github, but on the other hand, it has other nice features.
As you wrote, it depends on what project you are working on and how you are working with it when you choose hosting site. I was curious if there were any site that had any special feature that you could not live without, such as a superior bug tracking system or an easy to use collaboration tool.
I prefer to have “total control” over my software. So I host my projects on my own webpage.
For 30,= a year, I have my own domain/url, 3 GB diskspace and 50 GB/month datatraffic.