I agree this thread indicates that releasing is easier once you know and could use some work to help that, but we should move that discussion to another thread.
As an aside, rosindex.github.io could be modified to generate an RSS feed of new packages, even distro-specific ones, or ones that depends on certain packages. The only thing that’s lacking at the moment is funding to keep it generated frequently enough to be useful.
Thanks for the links Tully, especially regarding the forum structure.
I’d still like to move forward on having a category dedicated to software release announcements as described above. I believe it is significant enough to have it listed up front for new users to find rather than be hidden internally somewhere as a tag. I also think it has enough differentiation from the Projects group to warrant its own category. I would for example have been interested in tuning into notifications about software releases but not projects over the last two years (would read them at my leisure) and I’d visit it frequently enough to find a repeated filter applied to viewing the projects category tiring.
It’s also a way of reducing the barrier in a small way to get people using each other’s software, which would in turn foster contributions and collaboration. Best motivation imo.
I like the human in the loop for this - it’s a forum and the interaction with a human for a newly introduced package is valuable. It could be useful having rosindex do notifications of its own though (future feature request ;))
I always thought that a little tagging of packages would go a long way. At one point I was trying to get people to tag their packages with CategoryURDF on the wiki to mark all urdf examples.
@tfoote could we have a yea or nay on the creation of a Software Release Announcements category? Or whatever it takes to decide one way or another on the creation of a new category?
Aye, I sometimes feel the community was noisier when it was 10 times smaller!
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@Daniel_Stonier How about we just explicitly add that to the description of General and ask people to announce there with a tag “release”. This is the same as previously announcing it to ros-users.
I’d rather not segregate it away until it becomes overwhelming to avoid fragmentation and decision paralysis for people posting.
I guess I’m fine with that. It’s at least a place/convention we can encourage and not a topic that needs to be ‘walled off’ into an isolated forum. It hopefully will not have the ros-users problem too - there should be no discouragement from posting to it as discussed above.
My primary issue is in discovering/browsing for them. Tracking and discussing community software releases is such a core activity I would have liked all my devs engaging in. However, the current layout is very category-centric. The landing page displays a category based listing, the top banner does not have a tags drop down like at https://try.discourse.org/. Knowing the tag convention and then searching for a tag is not a process I think many of them would have done without laying it down for them. Shifting what should be one of the most common (or encouraged to be) activities on discourse to a tag based approach when the site is mostly category-centric is a little clunky.
If everyone’s ok with this, I’ll move forward with an email to ros-users advocating posting in General with the release tag tomorrow. Please post if you have any different thoughts before then!
@tfoote can we get a Tags dropdown on the discourse landing page like at https://try.discourse.org/? If it’s the discourse-tagging plugin you’re using, instructions are here - Enable Tags menu/filter. If it’s part of the newer versions of discourse, probably the instructions are similar.
I found the tag dropdown option and have turned it on. You should see it at the top of all listings now.
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