I understand the reasoning behind limiting the number of categories and having many tags to tag the topics which fall each into one of the few categories. Nevertheless, I suggest to consider opening two new categories¹:
⬤ Meta
The (La)TeX Stack Exchange community — like other SE Q&A communities — has a special meta section which is separate from the main section. I think having a ‘Meta’ category is a good idea.
Pros: Discussions about Typst and discussions about discussions about Typst are two wholly different things, on two different levels of abstraction. Having ‘meta’ discussions in a special category leaves all of the discussions in the General category sharing the same kind of discussion: about Typst. People are here to discuss Typst and to seek help when they have a problem. We don’t want meta discussions to ‘contaminate’ the search results or the list of topics.
Cons: Opening another category when General is already a catch-all category.
(Suggesting this category makes this topic not just a meta one, but a meta^2 one… )
⬤ Package announcements
We have the Typst Universe where ‘New & Hot’ packages (=recently created or updated) are listed in a special stream. I suggest opening a category for announcements about packages, covering both new packages and major updates of existing packages (where the update fundamentally improves the functionality of the package; minor incremental improvements should not belong there, the way I see it).
Pros: The ‘New & Hot’ section on the Typst Universe page is very limited: it doesn’t distinguish between new packages and updated ones; nor does it distinguish between major updates which are qualitatively different and minor incremental ones; it is limited to four items with no additional information; it doesn’t encourage discussion or provide means for discussion. A special category on the forum does all these. One thing Typst does very well is community-building. Having a place for package developers to announce their packages in a forum provides them with an opportunity to engage with potential and current users in a direct way, not limited to interactions concerning bugs and feature requests (which are what issues on Git forges are for). This also enhances discoverability and opens new ways for collaborations.
Cons: Yet again, opening another category when General is already a catch-all category.
Conclusion
I think both cases (each for its own reasons) merit dedicated categories: because it ¥consists of a different kind of discussions (the first case) or of a kind special enough to qualify having a distinct ‘town square’ for the package ecosystem (the second case).
¹ These two suggestions are completely independent. The reason I didn’t split them into two topics is that I don’t want to spam…
If you mean that a lot of topics are already marked with General, then I’m pretty sure moderators can change topic’s category and tags and everything. Although this is an additional manual work.
I think Showcase is already a good category for that/is intended for that. Because in the Discord server, the “showcase” section is already used for this. There should be a good balance in the category count, and splitting it more than necessary is probably not a great idea.
package announcements to keep track of developments in the ecosystem. This gives a quick way to check anything new that might be relevant to my work. In particular when coming back from holidays I’d go through the list of announcements since I left.
showcases to see what other people are doing. I would use this for leisurely browsing, when I’m bored, tired or just curious and have some time for distractions.
Yeah, the way I understand it, Showcase is for things people produced with Typst, be they neat tricks or beautifully-typeset documents. To quote the description from the categories page:
Showcase
This is the place to post in if you want to show off something you created with Typst: Be it the most beautiful paper you have ever seen or something extremely out-of-the box and crazy.
The proposed ‘Package announcements’ category is for a completely different purpose, as described above.
Yeah, the way I understand it, Showcase is for things people produced with Typst, be they neat tricks or beautifully-typeset documents. To quote the description from the categories page:
Showcase
This is the place to post in if you want to show off something you created with Typst: Be it the most beautiful paper you have ever seen or something extremely out-of-the box and crazy.
The proposed ‘Package announcements’ category is for a completely different purpose, as described above.
While that’s true, the discord channel has the same description, yet contains a lot of package announcements anyway. That being said, I’m in favor of an announcement category, I think when people look at showcase, they’re generally looking for cool and beautiful documents.
Such a category could also include announcements for external tooling like LSPs, test runners and package managers too.
You should keep in mind that not everyone will announce an update of their packages. Some can also forget to do it. So I wouldn’t (solely) rely on this list and instead go through the list of used packages by hand (through the Search — Typst: Universe).
With tinymist LSP server (or manually) you can get a list of all versions of all packages by typing #import "@". Which is how I nowadays update my packages. Normally I would just use snippets with hard-coded version that I previously used.
I’m staying neutral about the new categories’ addition, BTW.
I mean it would be a good way to keep up to date with “what’s going on”, not as an exhaustive list. (I must confess I’m not too obsessive about updating the packages I use until I actually need something from the new version )
You should keep in mind that not everyone will announce an update of their packages. Some can also forget to do it. So I wouldn’t (solely) rely on this list and instead go through the list of used packages by hand (through the Search — Typst: Universe).
The good thing is that an ecosystem category could still serve as a “What’s New” type of category, it need not be the author of a package who creates the post about a new update, anyone can. I doubt they intended for it to be used as a source of absolute truth about the whole state of the ecosystem.
With tinymist LSP server (or manually) you can get a list of all versions of all packages by typing #import "@". Which is how I nowadays update my packages. Normally I would just use snippets with hard-coded version that I previously used.
Fair enough, but I think you won’t know what features and fixes such a new version contains until you check it out yourself.
That’s a wonderful idea! While I suppose most of the announcements will be of packages, it is both shorter (one word instead of two, which conforms with the other categories) and better (because it includes other related tools, not strictly Typst packages) to name the category ‘Announcements’.
Discussions about Typst and discussions about discussions about Typst are two wholly different things, on two different levels of abstraction. Having ‘meta’ discussions in a special category leaves all of the discussions in the General category sharing the same kind of discussion: about Typst.
Opening another category when General is already a catch-all category.
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