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by k3n 4729 days ago
Which makes me wonder, since that wasn't all that long ago, why did they not give a teaser? Or did they, and we all missed it?

Discontinuing the downloads was a big deal to a lot of people, which generated a non-trivial amount of bad press, but if they'd simply said "we have something better in the works" then I don't think anyone would've cared. Surely this wasn't dreamt up in between then and now...?
2 comments
rtomayko 4729 days ago
We don't talk about unshipped features as a rule. It's hard to do so in a way that doesn't imply promises or timeframes.
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ics 4729 days ago
Still, why would you get rid of it in the first place just because something is better on the way? IIRC their reasons for getting rid of it had to do with not being a distribution center and focusing strictly on the source code development. It probably wasn't just "dreamt up" but more likely they found new reasons why it should complement their future business model.
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rtomayko 4729 days ago
We thought the Downloads feature was doing more harm than good in its previous form. Quality-wise it just wasn't up to snuff (failed frequently, flash, lack of design). Bad experiences on the site need to be fixed or killed. No one was willing to dedicate time to fixing it because they felt their time was better spent on other things so that left killing it.

The timing of the Releases feature only entered into the decision a little bit. It's hard to tell when something is going to ship at GitHub because there's no deadlines. Projects are done when they're done. The downside to this approach is that you can't rely on ship dates when making decisions like when to kill a feature something might replace.

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atesti 4728 days ago
But you didn't just kill a feature, you also killed data with it!

Gladly I am not affected, I have not recently tried to download an abandoned binary for a project hosted on github and it was deleted without replacement, but I still feel sad about what might now be lost

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hrjet 4728 days ago
Huh? This one requires flash too AFAICT!
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hrjet 4726 days ago
I sought and got clarification from Github. The Flash is only for copy-to-clipboard functionality. Not related to Releases.
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