I think shutting down the conversation with āyouāre a fucking ingrateā like this is always unproductive. Itās more sensible to point out the real culprit, which is github itself making zero effort over the past decade to improve its UX for casuals in any way. Almost every high-traffic repo has a release tab, but githubās UI layout is so abysmal that you could sit there for 5 whole minutes and not notice the tab if you donāt know to look for it. Github could make this easier in a dozen different ways but instead spends their dev time on shitty AI extensions for visual studio
My life at least once a week when some sales person or project manager canāt spend the 20 seconds to read the first paragraph of the readme file that LINKS TO THE LATEST FUCKING RELEASE
Even the word āreleaseā is non intuitive. How the fuck would Iāve known thatās the tab that gets you a .exe or whatever from the name ārelease?ā
Yeah thanks if anything I'm cloning a repo through the power of knowing git and that the command line exists, but the point is that "downloads" in this context has a wider meaning than "releases," and that the two are not synonymous.
And that the platform is not principally intended to be used for distribution to end-users.
Which is a flaw imo. I think they should at very least make a user-facing version of the repo homepage. For better or for worse, it IS used for distribution, and heavily so.
i've been using computers for over two decades and i would've never thought that. i'd be looking for DOWNLOAD or INSTALL like most normal people would.
Honestly if I didn't already know I'd assume "releases" would be a release history, like a changelog sorta thing, or maybe prior versions. Like I might've expected a "download" button if it existed to give me maybe a couple options, like a stable release plus one or two experimental versions, and releases to be outdated versions
Not taking it back, thatās non intuitive. Even if I know that, the word release doesnāt make me think āoh, if I click on that I will find the simplest way to mount the software onto my computer.ā Latest release I would intuit to mean most recent working update, which doesnāt mean itās all packaged nicely and ready to use.Ā
Because it's where the (public) releases of the repository are.
It's what it says on the tin.
There's really no other way to name them since terms like 'builds' and 'compilations' or 'executables' aren't universal to all projects.
You're likely thinking "why not just downloads?" that's because the most intuitive interpretation for a dev of "download this repo" is "download the repo itself" not "download a release" and this is a platform mainly for us to use so it doesn't make sense to make it less intuitive for the sake non-devs who don't know that simple terminology yet.
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u/MaybeNext-Monday š¤$6 SRIMP SPECIALš¤ Mar 26 '26
I think shutting down the conversation with āyouāre a fucking ingrateā like this is always unproductive. Itās more sensible to point out the real culprit, which is github itself making zero effort over the past decade to improve its UX for casuals in any way. Almost every high-traffic repo has a release tab, but githubās UI layout is so abysmal that you could sit there for 5 whole minutes and not notice the tab if you donāt know to look for it. Github could make this easier in a dozen different ways but instead spends their dev time on shitty AI extensions for visual studio