I think what I’d like to see is a section for software downloads that has been developed either as testing or stable, which doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
I’m thinking about the likes of @Carmelo_DrRaw’s excellent GIMP appimage. The way it is atm, we have to scroll further down the front page to find it, and goes further down the more people post. But by having these in a separate downloadable section, makes it far easier to locate and browse to.
I guess the only caviet would be that items placed there, for the ease of community members, would be that they would have to be a single-file appimage, snap, deb, rpm, exe, etc… or a link pointing to a ppa or compiling page.
Having such a section may also encourage other developers to show off their work, by creating an appimage, snap and posting it, who may want a much greater exposure (pun not intended) to those of us who get lost in complilng, and thus won’t touch anything that requires such.
I agree that grouping the known download links for installable packages that are verified by the community would be of great help.
As for what concerns the gimp appimage, the current solution is only temporary, to allow some initial testing. I think it is now time to give it a more official place… why not here?
Among the packages that would be worth including in the download links category, I would propose:
I would opt for a page in this case. All links in one place, and only those pointing to the best and/or most up-to-date versions of the various programs.
For users who want to get exactly what they need in less than 5 minutes
I started drafting a “Software Downloads Links” page:
Welcome
This post is meant to house links to download software built by the community that does not have a proper distribution place (… or we’ll become the distribution place?). You should have a look at our software page for a large list of software and links to their home pages.
Some of the provided or linked packages provide software in alpha or beta state and are hosted here for the tester’s convenience. If you are uncertain which version to install, please check the software’s original home page or feel free to ask in the forum.
I would issue a warning in the prologue: “Some of the provided or linked packages provide software in aplha or beta state and are hosted here for the tester’s convenience. If you are uncertain which version to install, please check the software’s original home page or feel free to ask on discuss.pixls.us.”
Maybe each of the links could be accompanied by a little text explaining the status and contents of the package.
The software page might be better pointing to the “official” pages of the various projects. If we have local builds that we want to make people aware of, we could add some text to each entry with links into the appropriate post here on discuss (your sticky post).
If we really want another page to cover these special builds, @paperdigits and I can look into auto-generating a semi-dynamic page on the main site that can pull it’s content from a post here on discuss. (Like pull the page data from the first post in a topic that is a wiki possibly).
Easy? Possibly. I’ll have a look at the host for the main site at the moment to see if I can get access created easily for folks. Then I can just give access to the project authors and let them upload as needed. I’ll have a look today and test this with @paperdigits or @Carmelo_DrRaw.
I’m in the process of figuring out either a) how to add a user + ssh access to someone on my shared hosting plan, or b) falling back to getting you an acct on the discuss server with a temporary upload dir that I’ll rsync back to the webhost with. Still looking!
I have now a gimp appimage which seems to be reasonably good enough to be announced to a wider audience.
Do you think we can now host the package here on pixls.us and put a direct link on the new page created by @paperdigits?
I will then also add some short installation instructions…
For the moment we only have a link to the forum thread, and from there to the packages on dropbox… very difficult to follwlow. What about hosting the package directly on pixls.us?
Oh? You didn’t upload the file directly to pixls.us? You should be able to. I can then update @paperdigits post with a link (and we should probably consider a blog post on this too).
Since you are a mod, feel free to edit my post if you’d like! I am uncomfortable with making the page community wiki, which I had originally thought of.
for proposing a “download links” category.