[Meta] RELEASES.md isn't rendered on GitHub.com

[LDVSOFT]

Hi, Rust contributors!

Take a look at Rust releases file: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/RELEASES.md. For me, GitHub just states that rendering it took too long, so it won't show it. In my opinion rendering Markdown shouldn't be so hard to render a rarely updated half-megabyte file, but it's to GitHub developers who are managing the platform and their workload might dictate the limits. However, even if the current file could be rendered, it will still continue to grow with each release.

I see several ways to tackle this problem:

• Keep things as they are right now. Even if Releases isn't viewable on the GitHub website, you can still read it sources or view in editor/IDE that can show rendered MarkDown, and I guess releases blog posts are very similar to a separate chapter of that file.
• Contact GitHub team, maybe they could provide a solution or advice from their side.
• Split RELEASES.md. file. Several other projects use several Releases / ChangeLog files, so that every one of those isn't that big. However, it often comes from the fact that they have a deeper versioning scheme, where every file represents one major or minor series, i.e. 1.* or 1.2.*, and are created rarely, while fixes releases are much more often. Rust versions since 1.0 aren't like that, we for the most time just have incrementing minor version with rare bug-fixing releases. I have a quick thought that we could just aggregate those by 10 or by release a year, but it requires further thoughts on UX of the whole thing.
  • What we could do is to add just one "older releases" and only keep several recent ones (like, for a year) in a RELEASES.md.

Anyway, those are just my thoughts, and maybe tomorrow the file will still be viewable as it has been before.

[ChrisDenton]

This is also being discussed on Zulip but it's good to have an issue to track it.

[Rageking8]

Another thing that may be of interest is that the RELEASES.md file successfully renders on the GitHub Android App although it's a bit jittery. Problem might be web specific.

[Rageking8]

@rustbot label +A-meta

[tanriol]

Note that the pre-release testing blog post links to RELEASES.md on GitHub that fails to render for some people, and that does not feel good.

[VitWW]

A quick alternative -

1. remain RELEASES.md as is
2. add a file RELEASESRecent.md (or RELEASES2020.md), which starts from Version 1.40.0 (2019-12-19) (~1/3 of full size) and above and has a link to full RELEASES.md
3. Use link RELEASESRecent.md in public posts

[simonbuchan]

Some other options for splitting it up:

• RELEASE_$VERSION.md (and RELEASES.md being an index?) - would probably make it too annoying to find a specific change
• A current RELEASES.md and RELEASES_$FROM_$TO.md broken out each time it gets too big - a little weird and guaranteed worst viewing performance.
• An index RELEASES.md with version ranges for RELEASES_$YEAR.md - I kind of like this one?

[djc]

I put up an MVP PR in #112135.