I am very glad to see that so many rust projects are announced on these forums, it shows that the rust ecosystem is in good health and growing strong
In this topic I'd like to discuss the 'best practice' for the announcement topics themselves. I'm curious if there is any "preferred" style in the community for release announcements.
Over the years, I've seen two dominant strategies evolve:
"topic per release": where for every release a new topic is opened.
good examples of this strategy:
"running topic", where a single topic for the project is started, and each release is an additional post in the chain. The topic title can optionally be updated to the latest version number.
good examples of this strategy:
What I like about the running topic is that it nicely centralises the discussion around a crate, there is a "home" for the crate and any meta-discussion surrounding it. As a nice side-effect, the time-skip between releases is nicely visualised because Discourse shows how many days past between posts if it has "been a while" (e.g. "8 days later"). Also, this keeps the amount of total topics in the announcements category more manageable.
What I like about the topic-per-release is that we don't 'bump' older threads, and that the discussions of multiple versions don't mix. Especially for more popular crates, with many replies, this can keep the topics more organised, at the "cost" of more topics in the announcements category.
So, personally, I can live with both models (though I'd slightly prefer running topics). However, I am interested in what the community standard (if any) is. What do you think?
Long threads are not good for announcements. I'd much rather have a new thread per release so that the comments are restricted to the announced version.
In my experience, there's usually only a few "congrats" type of comments, maybe a short discussion (3~4 posts) related directly to the advertised release, and then a release topic "falls back asleep" until the next announcement.
I'd gladly be proved wrong though! Counter-examples welcome to liven up the discussion
Exceptions to this rhythm seem to be either big "breaking changes" threads, or "The Big One-Point-Zero" threads (which usually channel a fair bit of breaking-changes).
I can see us ending up with some form of middle ground, where it's "usually" a running topic, with a reset to a new topic when reaching 1.0, and for each major version release thereafter.
I prefer one topic per release, because I believe that a running topic is easy to miss. Personally, I don't really browse around the forum. I just check new and unread topics once a day. That means, unless I've subscribed to a running topic right at the beginning, I'll miss all subsequent release announcement.
I like that running topics give me one place to subscribe to for news about a crate, but I'd rather have the chance to (re)discover a crate that didn't catch my attention initially.
But when a new post is made in a topic, it gets bumped all the way back to the top of the "latest" view and/or the announcements category, exactly the same like a 'new' topic. Wouldn't you catch it then?
(cf. topics that are necro'd after more than a year).
Or do I misunderstand your workflow?
I don't have much of an opinion on this, but I do kind of lean towards one continuous thread because it's a neat way to preserve history. The reason why I made a new one for palette was that I simply forgot about the previous one. It's been a while between them.... I realized later that I probably should have checked if I made one before and extended it.
"Latest" is different from "New" and "Unread". I track "New" because I want to find out about new topics that might interest me. I track "Unread" because I want to stay up to date on topics that I already know I'm interested in.
I don't read "Latest", because it supposedly contains a lot of topics that I already decided I don't want to follow. Although, to be fair, I haven't tried reading it in a while. Maybe it's not the time sink I fear it would be.
Ah, that makes sense yes. Especially if you're not so interested in the help category, which tends to be quite busy.
I personally find that Discourse makes it quite easy to filter out my subscribed topics, because the new post count appears in a very distinct blue number-bubble, thereby making that topic "pop out" from the background "noise". Of course, YMMW, and there is no "wrong" way to use this forum
Insights like yours are exactly the reason I started this topic
P.S. Interesting to see such a neck-a-neck race in the Poll! I didn't expect it to be evenly matched!
I announce releases of UUID crate here and i have followed one thread for all 0.6.x releases. Since most minor releases won't get any comments from users, it is sort of wasteful to have an entire thread for minor releases.
I think that per topic releases are more open to discussion. It can be a little overwhelming to have 30-40 different posts to read through when topics are running.
Being said, there should be a time frame (i.e. within the week if new updates are made, it should be an update to an existing topic)
I guess I wanted to limit creating new topics. But if people don’t mind that, I’m happy to go the way of the community. We can always link back to the previous topic to continue the chain.
