On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 07:39:08AM -0700, Mattmann, Chris A (388J) wrote: > Hmm, we're debating the download link here, right? So, why not cruft the > announcement to specify that the link will be available within X days?
The download page issue will be moot shortly. Our multi-page site has been sent live, and we now have a placeholder at <http://incubator.apache.org/lucy/download.html>. I'm working on getting a real download page set up. (Hmm. I wonder if that page ought to be named "download.cgi", like the excellent HTTPD download page at <http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi>. It's much more user-friendly than this Lucene page I used as a template: <http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/releases.html>.) As to why not promise a link to be named later, it's a matter of consumer convenience. I don't want to make too big a deal about this specific case, but the general principle is that if you don't make your product easy to consume, you are guaranteed to lose some fraction of your potential customers. It also just sounds rushed and amateurish to refer people to an "under construction" web page. > There's nothing limiting our contact with the rest of the foundation -- if > we release every 72 hours which is theoretically possible (or 72+N hours), > we could send a release announcement that frequently. Indeed. And since we intend to release version 0.1.1 within a relatively short time to address portability problems, we will have repeated contacts with the rest of the Apache community via ASF channels like [email protected]. That won't be true for external channels like perlmonks.org though -- it's only justifiable to publish major announcements there. The product launch of Lucy qualifies, but the release of 0.1.1 won't. :) So it's more important to get the external announcements done right, as we don't get a lot of chances. > 1. push Lucy tarball bits and KEYS/CHANGES to the mirrors today (since > release VOTE has now passed on [email protected]). Joe I need your help > with this, right, to do that magic initially for releases to sync to the > mirrors from www/www.apache.org/incubator/dist/lucy? +1 > 2. send ANNOUNCE emails to [email protected] and > lucy-{dev|user}@incubator.a.o with your wording, but maybe with something > like the below added to it: > > Initially the download link won't be available while we are updating the > Lucy website. But the release should still be available from > http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi... > > I'm OK with waiting on 2 until the Lucy website is updated, but like I said, > I don't think it's a blocker to sending the emails. The consumers are > interested in the Lucy product, aka the software bits. If the website is out > of sync, that shouldn't block pushing the VOTEd on, accepted bits to the > mirrors. We now have API documentation on the staging site. http://lucy.staging.apache.org/lucy/docs/perl/ It could really use some CSS and some syntax highlighting, but it gets the job done for now. I think it's important to get the downloads page in place, so that we can send out a release announcement with no apologies. The release tarball doesn't have to be perfect (and it's not), and the website doesn't have to be perfect (it's not either), but let's make sure that we fully exploit the opportunity that a product launch affords us. Marvin Humphrey
