UI Notifications for new releases

Development RFCs
#1

Hi,

there is a proposal PR for notifying admins of new Forman releases:

I really like the idea, but it can be intrusive for some users.

My feeling is go ahead with it and just improve the settings to have just two, but still having a choice to be notified about RCs defaulting to just major releases only.

Other options that comes to my mind are:

  • notify about nothing
  • notify only about the major releases without having an opt-in RCs
    • Directly from GH without a choice for url, just fetching errors
  • adding the release notifications to the RSS feed and thus showing them to the people who have rss notifications enabled

Another issue is if we should show only foreman releases or releases of some plugins as well, but that feels bit far fetched.

What do you guys think?

1 Like
#2

I’m opposed to following GH for releases. We always have time between tagging and actually releasing. Some tags end up being broken and never released. This shouldn’t create a notification for the user.

Currently the convention is post to https://community.theforeman.org/c/release-announcements but I can agree this is hard to parse since it relies on convention. Perhaps this should be more formalized.

An alternative “implementation” can be to post all releases to Foreman :: Foreman Blog as well as discourse. There is already the RSS notification poller which can fill the task as well. Perhaps we can even create a separate feed just with the release announcements.

Regarding plugins, it’s complicated. You have to know what’s cherry picked.

#3

Currently I took GitHub release atom because we don’t have a feed yet; I’m all for having a dedicated RSS/Atom feed for releases. IMHO the notifications for a new version should be separate from blog posts as the use-cases differ. Blog-post is for a very specific topic IMO a release is a release; ideally with a call to action on how to install it (or perhaps in a perfect future: trigger an upgrade from there immediately)

As for plugins, I like the idea and I think it could be done via a dedicated RSS/Atom feed.

The main question would probably be: how will maintain this or is there anything we can do to automate?

Kind regards,
Arend

#4

I don’t really like this, but it is easy solution :slight_smile:
I’d love some feed of releases, but I understand it’s just one more thing to take care of while releasing and we don’t want that :upside_down_face:

#5

Hello Folks, good morning

I really enjoy this feature, currently, we have a lot of products following on this line where when the new version is released, a hint or alert will be present until the customer provide the ack or at least upgrade to the latest version. This is good because will keep the customer aware of that lack between the current version and the latest available version.

We have already some customers asking for that on Satellite as well.

Thank you all!

#6

Would it help to use GH releases on top of git tags once the release is actually released? This would build a nice atom for Foreman releases, then downstream we would just need similar atom, but that should not be as hard, right?

1 Like
#7

would it be possible to do new releases and end of support/maintenance type notices?

#8

We don’t have a way of marking GH releases as EOL :thinking: only deleting it.
But implementing it just for downstream is definitelly possible.

@tbrisker any thoughts on better atom host for the releases?

#9

The other option I was thinking of is adding some endpoint on the website that provides whatever information we want foreman to know about.

1 Like
#10

That’s pretty fair option, but it would mean you’re commiting to maintaining it :thinking:
But I believe it’s a great feature to have and shame on a project that doesn’t have release atom available.
So how can I halp?

#11

I volunteer to help as well :slight_smile: