Consider adding a clarifying note to blog posts about pre-release features
dempseyatgithub opened this issue · 2 comments
Capturing a comment from
https://forums.swift.org/t/confused-by-communication-around-swift-6/72342
I understand the Swift community is not responsible for communication by Apple, but I feel like posts like Swift.org - Iterate Over Parameter Packs in Swift 6.0 on swift.org could improve clarity on this by adding something like this:
Swift 6 is in active development and is expected to release this fall. In the meantime, you can try out the pre-release from the downloads page.
When there blog posts about features in pre-release versions of Swift, it can be confusing to the reader as to whether the referenced feature is already available in a release or is coming in the future.
This post is unique in that it explains a pre-release feature, but is written as if 6.0 is already released (there are no references to needing a pre-release version for the feature, it assumes the reader is already well-versed in the current state of released and development versions of Swift)
A general solution might be if a a post is about a pre-release feature, add something to the front matter of the post:
expectedIn: 6
And a general message like:
"Swift %%expectedIn%% is in active development and will be released in the future. In the meantime, you can try out the pre-release from the downloads page."
The message only appears if "expectedIn" has a value and it is greater than the latest version in the releases file.
Otherwise, a message like this can easily get out of date.
Or, this might be so rare in a post, possibly it isn't worth the generalization.
Instead, an issue to remove the note when the required version ships could be filed to ensure removing the note isn't forgotten.
The message only appears if "expectedIn" has a value and it is greater than the latest version in the releases file.
Otherwise, a message like this can easily get out of date.
This is a great idea and I'd say this is how we should implement this.