A small request regarding package announcements

Hello,

I try to include every announcement of new or updated packages in the OCaml Weekly News. For package updates, it would be most useful if the message included a short summary of what the package does, ideally with a link to its home page, so that the announcement be self contained.

Thanks a lot,

Alan

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Let me strongly second this. People often put out really cryptic announcements, too, like “foo is a ppx that generates gazorknoplants for baz”, and sometimes even do things like releasing packages with nothing more than the name and the fact that the package has been updated. I’ve also seen examples of people not putting a description into their OPAM package file (several times recently, in fact.)

If you work hard creating a package, you probably want people to use it. Spending an extra couple of minutes writing up an explanation of what it does is necessary so that people will know that they want your package.

Programmers are confronted with dozens of new packages going by every day, and don’t have a lot of time on top of their usual work. They certainly have no time to go to the github page of every new package and carefully read the code to find out what it does so they can figure out if they could make use of it. They may not even have the spare time to click through to a documentation page if they don’t know why they would want to. Taking a few minutes to write an explanation of what your package does will make it much more likely others eventually use your work.

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