Hi, is there an official way to stay updated on new features and changes to osm.org?
Recently we’ve seen additions like the comments icon, a “changeset heatmap”, a new page listing changeset comments by user, and now multi-colored bboxes. But I always seem to discover these changes by chance — through Discord, the better-osm thread, or other random places.
Is there a centralized or official channel for keeping track of these updates?
Maybe Gravitystorm’s Github such as this milestone page
I have a look at the most recently merged pull requests from time to time. Distinguishing minor fixes from significant feature changes can be tough though. Pull requests · openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website · GitHub (edit: wrong link)
I really like many of the recent changes yet I have no clue about the ways of the Git so I would also welcome a short update in human readable form when new features ship.
I know that this creates even more work so I won’t be bugging those doing the work if there won’t be any easy to understand news snippets.
Thank you for your work.
The github repository that @ezekielf mentioned is the canonical source, but you can also follow the rails-dev mailing list which is a mirror of everything posted to the Github repository.
https://weeklyosm.eu/ often lists bigger ones but it relies on someone using Your submissions for weeklyOSM have become easier! – weekly – semanario – hebdo – 週刊 – týdeník – Wochennotiz – 주간 – tygodnik
Here a feature request on the source code repository.
as also posted on Github…
are you volunteering for maintaining it?
given quite scarce development resources it would probably better to spend them on reviewing 100+ waiting PRs (or fixing PRs based on reviews that were made)
also, while “Standard software development practice is to mark a version as a tag or a release” is true, this project does not do this and is closer to continuous deployment.
in general, you either need new people doing this or you ask people doing development to do less of it and spend time on extra paperwork/PR/promotion they were not doing so far.
Not in position to promise anything (I have no position on that software project), but if someone really wants changelog they can volunteer to maintain one.
Hello, I think you’re seeing this too narrowly. When it starts being paperwork, it’s being done wrong. For any and all volunteer FOSS projects out there with a relevant userbase and occasional maintainers and 0 money and foundations, a changelog is a summary that it takes a few seconds to fill.
no
it takes longer
you probably meant it is as a hyperbole, but such dismissing of effort needed to do this is not helpful. Especially if you ask people to do extra work, unpaid and you are not willing to volunteer to do it yourself.
people have different tolerance to filing extra documents
Uh, happy news from the GH issue:
I know @1ec5 has plans to start publicising some of the more significant changes
Speaking as a member of the CWG, but not for the CWG, I want to try to see if there is a way for us to help:
If I am reading correctly, I think that the request is for a standard and reliable source for human readable updates on osm.org, correct? Ideally something that a person could subscribe to, or might be prompted to see when they log in to the site.
From the forum it also sounds like Github is too technical and the WeeklyOSM is too dependent on someone submitting these requests in a predictable way.
Does this sound right?
To me, the best option that is doable is to establish the “better-osm” thread as the official thread for milestone OSM improvements–we might need to evolve that thread into an established Topic with tags, to make it more official and easier to find, but it would be best to keep that information in this forum. Otherwise, it will get lost in the wikis and listserves.
The other option, which would be to feed major milestone to the front page of OSM.org, would require development by a volunteer, which is outside of the ability of the CWG.
This still leave us the challenge of how to know what is a valid update. As @ezekielf said, distinguishing minor fixes from significant feature changes can be tough. It’s subjective, especially without a dedicated person to make the call and publish the most user-relevant changes in “human readable” format. As a CWG member I could commit to posting the updates in a thread on this forum, but I have no way of knowing which one are important, nor how to translate pull requests into ordinary language.
If anyone could help with this, I’m happy to try to operationalize getting the updates into this forum.
Courtney
Does this refer to the thread about the “better-osm-org” script?
That doesn’t seem like the right place as it is mainly about an “add-on” script the people can choose to use to add functionality not provided “officially” by osm.org. There are probably quite a few users of that script on this forum (myself included), but we can’t expect the average visitor to osm.org to use it. I think what we are talking about here are updates to the official site.
You’ve probably seen it elsewhere by now, but establishing more robust communication between the core software projects and the wider OSM community is one of my tasks as part of the CSDF role with the OSMF.
At the moment, I’m thinking of an informal user-oriented recap here on the forum, highlighting some selected changes to osm-website and similar projects, similar to what I’ve done for OHM for some time. I’ll be trawling through the Git commit history and pull request discussions so you won’t have to. It would be on a roughly monthly basis, to give the developers a little breathing room for fit and finish. (I’ll probably be leaning on the CWG to amplify these changes for those who don’t follow the forum.)
That said, don’t wait for my posts; feel free to talk about the changes you see and rope me into any discussions where you want to provide feedback. Also, those who participate in translating the website on Translatewiki.net already get a sneak peak at most changes, to the extent that they affect user-facing strings. A little incentive for helping out with that non-coding aspect of the project.
I’ll post these regular updates in a separate thread:
I like it! It’s like a more focused variant of WeeklyOSM that’s specifically about OSM website. Seems like a good idea, especially if big or frequent changes are upcoming.
Thanks for the shoutout on my contribution (right-to-left language stuff)! I might slowly start contributing more to the project, we’ll see.
I love this angle! Looking at the next open PRs, I’m eagerly awaiting how you will present them.
Although, I see some of my changes differently and the black-and-white decision if changes are user-facing as maybe not the best option. How likely most users will notice a change might be a thing to consider, I’m thinking of categories like “ohh that changed” and “something’s different, but I don’t know what”/“was that always this way?”.
The first category could be the headliners, and the second category of less noticeable changes could then be expanded with smaller things that are technically user-facing, and go a little deeper in the technical background. One change touching (barely, but still) the placement of direction routing popups comes to my mind.
But that and also the rest of this comment should be read while keeping my bias in mind.
Ooh, I missed that change amid the refactoring. It would be useful to highlight the more subtle changes, while omitting changes that the maintainers might not want to commit to on a permanent basis, such as the technically publicly accessible implementation details around geo URIs.
I’d like to convert these posts into what Discourse calls “wiki posts”, so you and other contributors can correct any glaring errors and omissions. Unfortunately I’m not seeing the button to do that. Maybe it’s only limited to certain categories.
@Mateusz_Konieczny No hyperbole. You’re supposed to keep the changelog updated as part of the pull request. Of course it’s a PITA to scroll the commit history weeks later.
The maintainer gave the reason in the GitHub ticket, that source code publishing is an implementation detail and what’s being released is a service, while I assumed it was a FOSS app.
it also takes more than a few seconds to fill.
And this “you’re supposed” is not a general law of a nature