Notifying package maintainers about check issues and version etiquette issues

[wlandau]

@shikokuchuo, as we agreed previously, spamming the inbox of maintainers who didn't even sign up for R-releases would be obnoxious. But what about RSS feeds? We could host an RSS feed for each package from a subpath of https://r-releases.github.io, and the bot that merges pull requests could invite people to subscribe to the individual package-specific RSS feeds. A daily GitHub Actions workflow could run releases::check_versions(), check the R-universe check API, and use that information to build or refresh all the RSS feeds of all contributed packages.

[wlandau]

Added this idea under "maintainer incentives" in the ISC proposal.

[shikokuchuo]

I think this is a good idea - to allow maintainers to request a feed. It should definitely be this way round. However, the use of RSS is really non-existent as far as I'm aware. Maybe it can be an automated email or some other kind of alert, but only if they actively subscribe. It also may not just be the maintainer, but the maintainer of downstream dependencies for example. Or perhaps we can have an option whereby they can subscribe to all 'relevant' events for their packages.

[wlandau]

However, the use of RSS is really non-existent as far as I'm aware.

RSS is an old technology, but from a quick search, I think it is still the canonical web feed technology of the public internet. Several third-party apps still let users subscribe to them.

Maybe it can be an automated email or some other kind of alert, but only if they actively subscribe.

Every other option I can think of looks very high-maintenance. Maintaining large email lists seems like a lot of work, and we might have to use a paid service like Mail Chimp. An alternative I thought about would be maintaining individual GitHub issues, but that would require too many API calls.

RSS is extremely efficient and lightweight. All we have to do is host an XML file for each package. Please let me know if you think of something comparably efficient, but all other options I can think of are costly in some way.

It also may not just be the maintainer, but the maintainer of downstream dependencies for example. Or perhaps we can have an option whereby they can subscribe to all 'relevant' events for their packages.

I was thinking the feed of an individual package could report problems with its upstream dependencies. So that information would already be factored in to the notifications.

[wlandau]

RSS still comes up quite a bit for things like blogs. And there are even ways to subscribe to RSS feeds for commits and pull requests on GitHub.

[shikokuchuo]

RSS was abandoned by all the major browser and email projects a few years ago. On Linux, I don't have an RSS reader. I don't have one on my iphone. As far as I'm aware, perhaps only Outlook supports it on Windows, but I'm not certain.

[wlandau]

What about third-party services like https://feedly.com?

And is there any other RSS-like web feed system which would reach people more easily and be cheap and easy for us to maintain?

[shikokuchuo]

Oh yeah I forgot about them. 'feedly' might be credible. Anyway, it doesn't cost anything for us to put it in our proposal. We can think about it when we get there.

[wlandau]

Yeah, and there are browser extensions too. I get the sense that RSS isn’t going away, it’s just decoupling from email clients etc.

thanks for being willing to keep it in the proposal. It’s not urgent. Besides, I think it’s so easy to implement (modularly in a completely separate repo) that there is barely even an opportunity cost.

[wlandau]

Relevant: https://ropensci.org/blog/2021/11/24/runiverse-badges/#why-rss-feeds-in-r-universe

[shikokuchuo]

Apart from the Slack integration for RSS feeds, there is also https://feedrabbit.com/ Came across this from a discussion at rweekly.

The idea works well for individual universes, but at the moment the RSS feed would be for the entire Multiverse and I see no automatic way to only 'subscribe' for certain packages.

[wlandau]

I was thinking we could generate a separate RSS/XML page for each package in production and host all those pages from r-multiverse.org (through a new repo in GitHub.com/r-multiverse). That would give us a different URL for each package, and it wouldn't be hard to maintain through GitHub Actions. Would that work?

[wlandau]

I heard from Eric Nantz that the ActivityPub protocol might help us here. Apparently it's a modern web notification protocol that can layer on top of RSS feeds. Apparently Mastodon uses it.