Mastodawn

Dear OSS community on Mastodon,

Every day I scroll through my feed and I see proud announcements like:

“First Alpha Relase of HyperTurboWidget available"

“Version 2.7.1 now with improved glorb handlers!”

“Flux Capacitor version 4.5 is out”

… and I sit there wondering if I should be excited, terrified, or calling a licensed electrician.

Don’t get me wrong, I love open source. I just have no idea what three quarters of these projects actually do. Are we talking about a web server? A file system? A middleware thingy that keeps the flux from overflowing into the space–time continuum?

So, dear OSS developers of the world: When you announce a new release, please give us (your adoring but slightly confused audience) just a tiny bit of context.

Tell us what your software does.
Tell us why this release is cool.
Tell us what it requires to work.

Example:

We are proud to announce Flux Capacitor version 4.5 is now avalaible. While it creates a nice wormhole to 1955, it requires an underlying gigawatt stack 1.21 to work reliably.

Because nobody wants to cheer enthusiastically for “v2.7.1” while secretly Googling “what is a glorb and why does it need handling”.

Yours truly,

Someone who wants to celebrate your achievements

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Karel 'Clock' K.Dec 8

@masek Many OSS projects now even lack a [Download] button, therefore I can't download them. It seems to be related to the fact that their page is on Github. It feels to me like a dissertation thesis just to figure out how to download it.

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Henrik Pauli Dec 9

@clock @masek There's even different levels of that :D

Like, I can understand not wanting to support pre-built binaries (the linux distros' packagers will do that eventually), but then it's still a good idea to make a Release and provide a tarball in that github facility.

Or failing that, tag a version at least so people can clone and check out that one. (and provide instructions for building, of course).

But in the earlier days of GH there were projects who were like "just checkout master" 😬

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Karel 'Clock' K.Dec 9

@phl @masek I mean this in the red circle, which I can't find on Github pages (not even a text link saying "Download"). This is the webpage of our FOSS Links browser. I assume many people will hear about our Links browser and think "OK - let's give it a try - to give it a try I need to download it first. Where can I download it? Oh, a huge green rectangle saying "Download"! That looks like the thing I have to click to download it!", then they click it and there is a selection of versions to download, binary vs. source download, pre-download prerequisities (libraries). But the important thing is they know where to click to even get into the download section. And I can't find that in the Github interface.

So when I can't find the Download button I can't download it. And when I can't download it, I can't use it. So I abandon the program and google up some alternative to it.

#links2gang #links2 #Twibright

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Henrik Pauli Dec 9

@clock @masek Oh yeah, I absolutely get it. There's so little effort to be made by the authors/maintainers to make the users more comfortable, and yet...

(and oh wow, good old Links and ELinks, they always come in handy :D)

(Also what is it with Czech and browser projects, Arachne was also written by someone from Czechia)

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Karel 'Clock' K.

@phl @masek thanks and with "handy" you mean it runs both on graphical and text console? 😀

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Henrik Pauli Dec 9

@clock I've only ever used it inside a terminal — sometimes it's useful to check things from a remote server via ssh and all that :D

Haven't had to use it as a fallback in a while, for when X11 doesn't work, as it has been rock solid, but there's been that in the past too. (nothing like reading ArchWiki in a Links while trying to figure out what you broke on your system :D)