No it's not the author's responsibility, but if a few seconds of work could make the update accessible to far more people (and get more people excited about it), I'm not sure I see an argument against putting that context. Frankly, every article and blog post should be written that way.

Sure, it's not required, but how many people were turned off because they had no idea what the article was about?

Should all monthly reports for this project start with a paragraph introducing the project itself? I don't believe so. I don't think this article was written with the general HN userbase in mind, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I don't think that it should, but I will say that people do tend to appreciate it. That said, as you said, nothing wrong with not doing it. With Rust, we just made a template for these sorts of posts that include a sentence explaining what Rust is right at the start, so no burden for us.

> Should all monthly reports for this project start with a paragraph introducing the project itself?

Why not? A lot of projects do it. You also don't have to include that introduction in your RSS feeds, for the most avid readers, but it's very useful for newcomers.

Labor is very expensive, I'd rather it be spent working on gcc-rs rather than making reports about working on gcc-rs more elaborate. I do think that it'd be reasonable to expect anyone who's somewhat interested in what this is about to investigate themselves. Having said that, I don't believe that this kind of a post is necessarily well suited for being posted on HN exactly because it's not aimed towards a more general audience but rather it's specifically targeted towards people who're already interested in the project.

I agree with the hidden cost of PR labor for volunteer-run projects. But a summary of the project can be very short and efficient. Copied (shortened) from the README:

> gccrs is a full alternative implementation of the Rust language ontop of GCC with the goal to become fully upstream with the GNU toolchain. Please find the answers to frequently asked questions over on: https://github.com/Rust-GCC/gccrs/wiki/Frequently-Asked-Ques...

Two sentences like these would be more than enough to give a person passing by enough information to know what it's about, if it'd be useful for them, and whether they'd like to keep on reading.