Re: Github Releases, with excellent timing

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 3 Jul 2013, at 14:52, Daniel Bünzli <daniel.buenzli@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Le mercredi, 3 juillet 2013 à 14:14, Anil Madhavapeddy a écrit :
>> It looks like you can attach arbitrary files to the release -- which have 
>> the transforms (setup.ml, utf files, etc). Isn't that enough?
> 
> I don't know there are not enough details in that page for me to know if that 
> would be workable, but I doubt it. I transform all my source files to tag 
> them with the version number of the release and I'm not going to drag and 
> drop files in a web ui interface.
> 
> There is also a big drawback to their approach. You no longer have a CHANGES 
> files that is part of your repo. It eschews the idea that a release tarball 
> is a somehow self-contained (re)presentation of your project. Your release 
> notes are no longer with your project but in github's infrastructure, you may 
> be fine with that, I'm not (remember that ten years ago most free software 
> was published on a different system, I don't see why this may not change 
> again).   

None of these seem like substantive blockers.  A quick online hunt shows that 
they're planning to extend the API to add Releases when it's stable.  An API 
would let us easily automate including the CHANGES file in the release tag, as 
well as auto-generating the release tarballs with the autogen files.  For now, 
I've experimentally released ocaml-cow to see what it looks like:

https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-cow/releases

> I think they really missed something on that one. They managed to make 
> README's something that automatically adds to the presentation of your repo. 
> They could have done the same thing by telling us that if our CHANGES files 
> have a particular structure they would make something useful with it (e.g. 
> match version tags and associate the corresponding release notes text to the 
> release tags). But maybe I'm old fashioned.

They can still do that. They've clearly just released the base feature first, 
which seems quite reasonable.

> Best,
> 
> Daniel
> 
> P.S. By the way opam really needs a way to show things like release notes and 
> readmes associated to a package along with the documentation.  

This can be done with external tools, which I've started at
https://github.com/avsm/opam-repo-tools/
but won't have time to finish for a while.  I'll probably extend it as soon as 
the Release API is out, as that'll save some time.

-anil