News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout? by jmeshell on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @07:18PM (#23621643)
I’d love to learn more about this! Why would a top level of Releases be useful?
Re:Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout? by gregmac on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @01:45PM (#23631292)
I think partly it's just the inconsistency that bothers me, but when I'm being a consumer of a project it's one of the main things I look at -- certainly more than many of the other top-level items.

* "Actions" are basically only useful to me as an active project contributor.

* "Security" is a pretty niche tab -- I think personally I've clicked on it only a handful of times, ever

* "Insights" I had forgotten about to be honest (and obviously don't use it), but even as I look at it now, I think it's somewhat useful for judging how active a project. For mature projects (that don't need active development) it says almost nothing. I personally do a fuzzy judgement on Releases, popularity, # Issues open/closed, # merged PRs, # and age of open PRs, # contributors.

I use "Releases" as a consumer in mainly three ways:

1) To help judge the quality and maturity of a project, in terms of how easy it will be to deal with as a dependency. Are releases being used (vs published adhoc)? Are there betas? Is there a changelog or curated release notes? Is semantic versioning being used? How frequent are releases?

2) When updating dependencies, and looking for breaking changes or things I need to update in usage.

3) For downloading, when it's the only way -- though this is typically linked from the main README, and I'd generally only care about the latest.

Re:Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout? by donatj on Wednesday June 24, 2020 @01:34AM (#23624444)
It's where a lot of projects keep their binaries, appended to releases. They've made it harder to get to.