Hi John, agreed, overdoing the downloads page is certainly a risk. And the added text does cover ground that is expanded on in the click-through sections. My concern is that as things stand, I find it unlikely that a new user will grok the subtleties of going for one option rather than the other. Summarizing the trade-offs (which I think by this point no one is disputing) right at the top should help the user _understand how to weigh his/her options_. I think it's not a problem if some info ends up being repeated: few users will be reading the entire Downloads page top-to-bottom (already 5.5 screen-fulls over here!). Without the tradeoffs explained pithily at the top, as as new user, I go the downloads page and I see that e.g. HP gives me plenty that I probably want. Sounds good to me! :) The page tells me that Stack gives me "the capacity to download and install" the same thing too, rather than that happening out-of-the-box. That doesn't sound very compelling. Why wouldn't I want everything just there from the get-go? Turns out there are good reasons why at this point you probably _don't_ want to be using the HP if you want to hack on multiple projects at once, reason being simply that HP assumes all projects can make do with a shared instance of the exact same versions of the libraries and tools that it ships with, when this assumption does not hold true in practice (again, in the future this may change). On 25 September 2015 at 02:30, John Wiegley <johnw@newartisans.com> wrote:
Boespflug, Mathieu <m@tweag.io> writes:
this is a nice summary of all options. May I suggest the following refinements to the summaries:
Hi Mathieu,
I like your enhancements, but I'm worried about it becoming *too* informative for new users. At a certain level of detail, it turns into a wall of text that no one reads. Like a lens, too little or too much focus is equally bad.
Can we make the text at the top both pithy and communicative, without repeating details that are given in the click-through sections? We currently discuss "what you get" at the click-through. We haven't really presented "consequences", and I'm loathe to add yet another section, unless people here think otherwise.
This is just the download page, after all. It's not meant to be an in-depth presentation of each option's pros and cons. Those capable of following such a discussion would probably not go to the download page to find it.
John