Overview

Welcome to the August 2023 edition of “What’s New in RokuCommunity.” Please consider subscribing to stay up to date with what’s happening in RokuCommunity.

August was a very slow month for RokuCommunity. Several core community contributors had some big family changes (see baby and marriage).

Thankfully @markwpearce was hard at work on more BrighterScript type tracking changes! None of these commits were included in a release until September, but it feels kind of silly to have a “whats new” for August that doesn’t at least link to some code…

We need your help

The RokuCommunity projects are maintained by a relatively small group of developers (mostly volunteers), and we have a growing list of of unresolved issues. We need your help! There are many different ways you can contribute. Whether it’s addressing bugs, improving documentation, introducing new features, or simply helping us manage our expanding list of GitHub issues, your involvement would be greatly appreciated. We are more than happy to guide you in finding the most suitable contribution method that aligns with your interests. To learn more about how you can contribute, feel free to reach out to us on Slack, or explore the existing GitHub issues:

Issue of the month

In this section, we highlight a specific issue where we could benefit from the community’s assistance in finding a solution. These problems are generally straightforward to address, and serve as an excellent opportunity to become acquainted with the RokuCommunity codebases.

This month, we’d like to draw attention to vscode-brightscript-language#374: Warn if package is too large. When you’re using the BrightScript Language extension for vscode, there are situations where you can craft a files array that accidentally includes many more files than you intended. This could include things like the entire node_modules folder, or all your photoshop source files. As the sideloaded .zip gets larger, it takes a much longer time to actually sideload to the Roku device. We can show loading bars, but that won’t draw enough attention to the root problem: your .zip is too large. Roku already has a max package size restriction of 4MB, so uploading much more than that is a waste of time and space.

vscode-brightscript-language#374: Warn if package is too large looks to assist developers by warning them if they are uploading a large package. Probably a limit of 12-15MB is enough, and this should be configurable.

If you’re interested in working on this feature, please comment on the github issue or reach out to us on Slack

Thank you

We just want to take this moment to say thank you to all of our awesome users. We build all of this software because we know the immense value that it brings to your developer experience. We appreciate your support and patience as we continue to innovate and support the RokuCommunity tools.