YJL

1   Benefits

• Expanding audience groups from only developers and contributors to day-to-day users, who are either don’t care about commits or detailed changes, but only the new releases; or don’t know much about development tools.
• Extending GitHub’s existing notification system to a slightly bigger usage, anything already in it, it’d be for releases as well.

2   Rationale

GitHub is big, whether you like it or not. Nevertheless, it can be better, it can be more than just a website or services for developers.

Earlier this month, I noticed that Watching can be useful and also annoying at the same time. How so? Take a look at the screenshot below:

There are a lot of notifications for commits. It’s good, because you don’t miss a single commit. However, as an user, that’s someone who doesn’t actually participate in development let alone being able to read the codes, he or she would probably only care about any new updates or the official packaged releases.

GitHub’s Watching is very helpful and Releases (+ tags) is a great feature, but not everyone cares about that much about a project’s very detailed development course. Not everybody needs to know about everything down to commit level.

Understandably, Watching by design is for developers or enthusiast contributors. But let’s think more about the notification system that is already in place, with some enhancement, you can add another layer to it, make it to be more than just Developer’s Notifier.

It can be User’s Notifier, GitHub can be not only for developers, not just for social coding; not only for open source lovers, but also for day-to-day program user’s hub. A website also provide service to normal user. Such notification would be a first nice feature towards that path.

Let’s face it, many projects or softwares are not be part of package managers, especially the new to the blocks. They just pop up and not many people are aware of, they are too early to be packaged for any package managers, But are they stable enough to make releases, certainly!

3   Mockup

I made a simple mockup, just to show one of possibilities of how it could be done:

There are some designs would have to be decided, but that’s not the focus of this blog post. Nevertheless, the UI for this notification option should be same, that’s as simple as current watching options.

It might have checkboxes for fine-tuning options, for examples, one for Releases, another for Tags. But in my opinion, that might be a bit overly complicated to some people. There are differences, but some people don’t even know how to use tags, so if GitHub implements new notification option, it might have to be very simple.

4   In the mean time

GitHub’s Releases and Tags already have feed support. You can already subscribe to such feeds and probably uses some services to convert a feed into email notification if you think that is necessary. But you can’t never only get only releases and/or tags in your GitHub dashboard, either you have all commits entries or nothing.

5   Final thoughts

Even you are a potential developers, there might be a chance you ain’t so interested in early stage of a project. Say before 0.1.0, if you want to participate in a project that is at least has some stability, you probably would want to wait out for a while, therefore getting only releases notifications might just what you need.

Or just wait for a project to finally release its first official release, this would be great way to receive the very first notification from a new project.

There definitely is a need for such notification option in source code hosting providers like GitHub. As far as I know, some open source tracking websites do provides notifications for releases and updates of projects.