I think RSS is still used. I know that people access the RSS feed for some other websites where I write articles, and I subscribe to the RSS feed for several news websites. So it's definitely used.
I don't know how many people use it, but the www.freedos.org website has an RSS feed for the news items. And a few people have emailed me over the years when there's a "hiccup" and SourceForge doesn't update the feed for a day: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="FreeDOS | What's New" href="https://sourceforge.net/p/freedos/news/feed.rss";> I think the focus isn't "do people use RSS feeds anymore" but is instead "who will read the news items in the RSS feed." Will people want to subscribe to the RSS to see package updates at the repository level? Or will people just watch for announcements about new versions on the freedos-devel email list? And/or will those people see those announcements anyway when they are posted as news items on the www.freedos.org website? On Sat, Apr 26, 2025 at 4:15 AM Jerome Shidel via Freedos-devel <freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote: > > Hi All, > > Does anybody use RSS anymore? > > As far as I know, all the major web browsers (at least the ones I use > regularly), > dropped support for RSS many years ago. > > The main reason I ask is in regards to the upcoming FDRepo v3. > > The current FDRepo v2 has an RSS feed that is lists new package updates. > > However, I never received any feedback in regards to that feature. > > This leads me to think precisely zero people ever used it. > > I think since RSS has been relegated to obscurity and the lack of apparent > users to the update feeds in the repositories, the feature will not be > included > in FDRepo v3. At least not initially. > > Then later on, if there is sufficient complaining about not providing the > update > RSS feed, I find the time and feel like it eventually add support for it into > v3 of > FDRepo. > > After all, it does not take long to get complaints when a feature someone > uses disappears. For example, when preparing the download repositories > for FreeDOS1.4. I preformed a clean-up and deleted a a bunch of stuff. > One thing I deleted was the automatically generated ISOs of all the packages > in the repositories. By design, FDRepo v2 would keep that ISO up to date. > However, if it did not exist, it would start maintaining one unless > specifically told > to do so. It took about 2 days before I started hearing “where is my ISO?" > > It is not difficult to create the feed. I just don’t see a point in doing > that extra > work for something nobody uses. > > Oh BTW, Stage 2 is moving along great. If all continues to go well, v3 will > hopefully be ready for use around the end of this month. > _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
