this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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It's an additional feature of GitHub that literally everyone uses. Therefore it has purpose. I think it's ridiculous to argue against it.
Explain to me how developers or the UI would suffer from easier access to releases?
Literally everyone? I’ve been a software engineer for ten years. My company doesn’t use it, and no company I’ve worked for has. I guess they are not part of “literally everyone?”
Explain to me how GitHub working on one product feature (releases) has no impact on how much they can work on others. Apparently in your rich enterprise software career you’ve found that resources and time are limitless? Or maybe you think it’s trivial for a platform like GitHub to change their UI.
This smacks of lots junior software engineers I’ve worked with who think problems are simple and solutions are easy because they’ve never actually DONE anything. I get that you’re very convinced that this is easy and cost less but it’s pretty clear to me you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Again. I've said before that release downloads are an additional feature. But it's a feature most people use. Neither did I say it was easy, nor it was cheap. Just that it makes sense and that it doesn't take anything away from the professionals regarding UI quality or focus.
No, what you mean is YOU use it and you’re assuming most people use GitHub the way you do. GitHub is first and foremost a platform for GIT. Git has nothing to do with releases or file downloads per se. Time spent improving the releases UI is time not spent doing other UI improvements. If you need more proof that it’s not worth it to spend time on the release UI, just take note of the fact that GitHub is not spending time on the release UI. If everyone was using it and it was deficient, do you really think that would be the case?
It makes sense from a pure UX perspective. But of course the real goal of GitHub is to make money, and their paying customers are mostly corporate entities using it for enterprise development. Unless those companies decide that a download button/better release feature is desirable, it's not likely to happen.
Most corporations tie GitHub into their own build system so such a feature isn't likely to be considered useful. They pay for GitHub to reduce development costs, which is why GitHub spends so much effort on analytics and the dev experience instead of open source/public users.
Thanks for understanding what I was getting at and your well written 'realistic' addition to it. There's not much I can add besides saying you're absolutely right.
Why would your company use that? Did they use github for public applications targeted to non-techincal users? Because that's what that page is for and what a huge chunk of Github users do.
A huge chunk of GitHub users? Citation needed. Sounds like what you mean is you and your communities use it that way.
I use it both ways. As a software engineer I use it for various packages, which don't even need a releases page. But also as an end-user of open source software, I use it to download pre-built binaries of said software. Idk if you know, but there's a lot of open-source software out there. And github is the most popular platform for hosting it. And when I say software, I mean the kind where you don't expect your users to know how to build it from code themselves.
If somebody doesn't have an idea of what they're talking about (allegedly) then it would be far more productive to explain it than to keep arguing about it without actually solving anything.
I mean I did try. They didn’t really listen, just repeated the same thing over and over again.
I just don't see that.