As Dave mentioned in some earlier thread, we've been conducting an experiment over the outbound links on the downloads page so we can further optimize layout. We've collected several months of results, and per analysis of that, we have a few proposed changes.
As this is effectively "release eve" and the lag between "discussion of experiment" to "implementation of patches" was longer than I wanted, I wanted to propose the least invasive, best for our user patches that would require limited discussion.
(I will publish a proposal for the ones that require more discussion later).
As such, the goal of this patchset is to make things even clearer for our users on what they can download and ensuring that it is a good experience.
Without further ado, here are five patches:
* Remove the "Build from Source" section on each of the Linux package pages. The traffic to those pages overwhelmingly (> 99+%) went for some form of pre-built package; people who wanted the source code would grab it based on the URL off of the main downloads page (which had a much higher clickthrough rate).
* URLs to the BigSQL packages are removed as the website is no longer available.
* Retitle the Linux distro packages to "native packages"; removed Debian backports section due to lack of traffic.
I think that's a bad name. Native packages is in my experience normally the term used to refer to e.g. DEBs and RPMs in comparison to things like installers, tarballs and source installs. And per that definition, that would include both both the distro built-in and th ones from our projects.
+1 for the removal of the explicit backports reference thouhg.
* Shorten the description on the macOS page and reorder the installers based on the overall traffic numbers.
* Remove cross-platform Linux installer due to lack of outbound traffic relative to the content on the pages.
Unless strenuous objection, my plan is to publish this prior to the release.[1]
