Re: Community News Window Pane

[Carnë Draug]

On 6 November 2013 14:50, Daniel J Sebald <address@hidden> wrote:
> Here is something that I'm just aware of with the new build--Community News
> window, a noticeable feature added so close to a release.  For multiple
> reasons, could we get rid of the Community News?
>
> 1) It really clutters the space upon first impression.  There is a good
> balance to strike with information content, and it is easy to be too busy
> with too many window panes.

I don't think anyone will actually keep that window open. It is meant
to just deliver news which are likely not super frequent. But to make
this more obvious, is it possible to set it as undocked/floating by
default?

> 2) This comment makes one cringe:
>
> "This window will be used to inform you about Octave community events.
> Octave may show it to you even if you've chosen hide the window by default.
> We'll try not to bother you too much, but we do want to keep you up to date
> with the latest information about important bug fixes, new releases, or any
> other news that all Octave users should be aware of.
> — The Octave Developers, October 8, 2013"
>
> "This window will be used to"
> Instead of providing actual community news, it tells one what it will be
> used for in the future.  Can we add thirty different features like that,
> with just an explanation of what's to come?

This window does not say anything really. It just shows what's on [1]

> "Octave may show it to you even if you've chosen hide the window"
> Like so many software updates, html reroutes, etc. Octave too now wants to
> join you in your living room.
>
> "We'll try not to bother you too much,"
> Ah!
>
> "latest information about important bug fixes"
> Admitting Octave is full of bugs.

I agree this can be worded differently. Luckily it's just a matter of
changing things in our side. In special, the part about "Octave may
show it to you even if you've chosen hide the window" which really
sounds like whatever your preferences and settings are, we will do
what we think is better.

> 3) Who is going to maintain this community news?  We've had this discussion
> at OctConf's about just exactly how much we can keep even developers
> up-to-date on things.  There are probably full-time software people at
> bigger companies who maintain community news types of things.  Octave
> doesn't have that resource bandwidth.

We already have planet octave[2]. It may be a good idea to define what
is community news. I'd guess it's something more specialized than what
is currently in planet Octave (and even more than what is currently
Octave's facebook and Google+). So what about having planet Octave
syndicate this Octave core/team news?

On a related note, what if instead of having a static page, it's a
actually a script that takes the octave version possibly showing a
different page? In the mean time we can have it always showing the
same thing but if in the future we want to specialize... It will also
give us an idea of the distribution of different Octave versions going
around.

Carnë

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/community-news.html
[2] http://planet.octave.org/