Releases on Github disappeared?

Product Support

AI-generated summary

mig5 reports that the releases on the Discourse GitHub repository have disappeared, affecting their ability to track the latest release via the atom feed and other methods. This change has broken their tooling, which relies on GitHub’s structured release data. Falco suggests an alternative release RSS feed, but mig5 finds it less suitable due to its unstructured content. mig5 is seeking a reason for the removal of the GitHub releases and a more reliable alternative.

1

Hi,

I have been relying on the atom feed at Release notes from discourse for a long time to alert me to the latest release, which has fed into some other tooling like Icinga and Slack notifications when the Discourse version is out of date.

(I know that Discourse can send e-mails about this, but e-mail is not a viable alerting mechanism for us).

It seems as of the weekend that all the releases disappeared from Releases · discourse/discourse · GitHub - was that deliberate?

This also means that other methods than feeds, such as REST API endpoints for repositories - GitHub Docs don’t work either, so https://api.github.com/repos/discourse/discourse/releases/latest now throws a 404.

Maybe there’s a good reason for this but I’m hopeful that releases can be restored on Github for what is a useful method to check the latest release. Alternatively, is this info available somewhere else? We can’t rely on Tags · discourse/discourse · GitHub because ‘latest-release’ doesn’t really point to a version number there.

Thanks!

2

We have an official release RSS feed at https://meta.discourse.org/tag/release-notes.rss.

That may be better suited for your needs!

3

Thanks - that’s a useful feed, but it’s also not really as good, because it’s somewhat ‘unstructured’ content. I would have to parse the title element, and that relies on human consistency - as soon as someone is inconsistent with the version number (perhaps putting a ‘v’ or ‘version X.X.X’ or putting it not at the start of the title) it could break.

This is why the strict, structured data from Github was really useful. Is there any reason it was removed?

Anyway, I’ll maybe try and rely on /tags at Github and just try and detect a higher version or something. Thanks nonetheless