Design of the tags page makes it hard to distinguish releases and provide high quality download links
Description
For my GitLab.com hosted applications I'd like to have a page for releases where non-technical users can download the latest binary release and see latest changes. I prefer having a releases page maintained semi automatically based on git tags (rather than something completely free-form like a wiki page or raw HTML), so gitlab's tags page seems the closest thing, but it's not good.
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Does not have clear headers and separation between releases. All text has the same font size. There is only a faint line separating releases, but IMHO that's not enough. With multiple releases it's not obviously clear where one ends and another starts.
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Headers are taken from the tagged commit and are not configurable. A good commit message is not a good name of a release (the last commit can be "Bumped version to 1.1", but the release title should rather be "Finally added the frobnicator feature!")
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Markdown headers and
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lines have lines stronger than separators between releases, so descriptions using these elements make the whole page even more confusing. -
Attachments are very ad-hoc and don't give ability to have a clear download button. For every release I try to fiddle a bit with markdown to make download links more visible, but that's laborious and still looks unappealing.
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Attachment's links are separate from Gitlab's own Download button added on each tag/release. For binary applications that button downloads the wrong thing.
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The page is named "tags", but for users unfamiliar with git jargon & gitlab this does not say "a place where you can download the latest version of this app".
Proposal
- Use huge font for headers
- Allow headers to be customized
- Add whitespace between releases, and maybe use more interesting layout than just everything chucked into one column.
- List attachments in place and style consistent with source code download links, and list the attachments first.
- Rename the page to "Releases" and/or allow projects to rename it (so they can name it "Downloads" for example)
Links / references
You-know-who IMHO has an excellent releases page and I miss it.
Documentation blurb
Overview
What is it?
Releases page.
Why should someone use this feature?
To provide easy to find, good-looking page for downloading releases of the application, as well as log of changes and access to previous releases. All git integrated and easy to update from the web.
What is the underlying (business) problem?
Low-maintenance way to provide pre-compiled versions of an application or a library.
How do you use this feature?
You add a tag and update its metadata, upload binaries via web GUI.
Use cases
As an application developer I'd like to have one place where I can direct users to download any version of my app, without having to build and maintain my own page for this.
Feature checklist
Make sure these are completed before closing the issue, with a link to the relevant commit.
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Feature assurance -
Documentation -
Added to features.yml