Learnings and observations from comparable decentralized registries

No an action item here as of yet, but wanted to draw attention to some features in relevant sites that I think we can aim for with SingerHub, and discuss which of these we want to incorporate or improve in our own hub.

Similar decentralized registries:

  1. Chocolatey Community Package Registry - https://community.chocolatey.org/
    • Description: A library of installable packages for the Windows OS.
    • Sample page for WSL2: https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/wsl2#collapsing-right-sidebar
    • Features:
      • Maintainers are listed on the site, along with (1) means to directly contact maintainer or (2) comment in a per-package Discus thread.
      • Users can report a package abandoned.
      • The Chocolatey website can broker a handoff process for packages from an unresponsive maintainer to a volunteer willing to become maintainer.
      • Site shows CI/CD or "Validation" test status.
      • Site shows number of downloads, last update, latest version number, etc.
  2. Terraform Registry - https://registry.terraform.io/
    • Description: Allows user-contributed and partner-contributed modules to be easily discovered and used by Terraform users.
    • Sample page for RDS: https://registry.terraform.io/modules/terraform-aws-modules/rds/aws/latest
    • Features:
      • Documented config options with sample usage.
      • List of versions, latest version, link to github
      • "Total provisions" metric, indicating number of successful invocations.
      • Link to report an issue.
      • Document which license (Apache 2.0, for the sample model link)
      • Official, Verified, and Community badges
      • Distinction between Providers and Modules
  3. PyPI Registry
    • Description: Find, install, and publish Python packages
    • Sample page for requests: https://pypi.org/project/requests/
    • Features:
      • Does not allow private packages, recommendation is to self-host
      • Has GitHub Statistics
      • License, Author, Requirements, latest version, release history
      • README of project is main thing on page
      • Data is available on libraries.io or in public BigQuery project
  4. npmjs registry
    • Description: For managing node.js packages
    • Sample page for express: https://www.npmjs.com/package/express
    • Features:
      • Similar to PyPI in terms of content
      • Shows dependencies and dependents
  5. DockerHub
    • Description: For managing and finding Containers (primarily) but also editions of Docker and different plugins
    • Sample page for ubuntu: https://hub.docker.com/_/ubuntu
    • Features:
      • Verified / Official tags
      • download counts, tags, reviews
      • Primarily shows the README on the page
  6. OctoPrint
Edited by Taylor A Murphy