No, it's not "welcome", because separate "downloads" are (1) no burden on people who don't use them, and (2) actually a useful feature.
In many cases, a tarball of the repo contents isn't the same thing as a distribution tarball, because the latter often contains various generated files that may be more annoying for the user to generate than is justified for somebody just interested in compiling and installing the software. Making a distribution tarball typically involves generating those things and packaging them together with the sources.
Some repos contains generated files as well to work around the issue, but this is ugly and causes its own problems.
> Github are nailing it
Er, removing useful features may be good from a business point of view (github may feel the support burden, etc, isn't justified by the usefulness), but I don't think it deserves to be called "nailing it" (unless "it" is the user, of course... :] )....
I feel like GitHub should not be the place where you host your distribution tarball. As was mentioned, GitHub is about source code and collaboration and the distribution of that source code.
It's just not inside the scope of what GitHub does, and in that sense I think this is an improvement because it makes for a more focused product.
Maybe github doesn't want that, but it's very common practice for small/simple projects to have only a github presence, and no dedicated website of their own at all. It's simple, easy, and keeps everything in one place.
Again, this change may very well be in github's interests, but it's also going to make life more annoying for many gibhut users.
I think what it comes down too here is that most developers are too cheap to pay for their own hosting and expect Github to provide free bandwidth and storage space for their compiled binaries and preconfigured projects. Github is a company at the end of the day and getting rid of the downloads API will probably save them a lot of money by kicking off the leeches who've been abusing and taking advantage of Github's storage and bandwidth generosity for far too long.
It literally costs cents for S3 and they offer a 1 year free usage tier for new signups. S3 or proper hosting is definitely the way to go.
For one it may amaze you, but some people actually pay for Github. Those same developers often have their own hosting (I personally have 3 linode vps's active for various projects)
The fact is it was just simpler as the maintainer of an Open Source project with numerous contributors to host it under one roof, all the contributors have their access granted in a single place, one set of keys to set up, one account to manage personally, and a single place to go look for X.
I am sure you love github and all, but I assure you you arent helping them by before anyone had even mentioned a word, insulting everyone who dared to voice an opposing opinion to this change, then continuing to do so in follow up comments.
These are my exact sentiments. While I can sympathise with those who run their project websites off of Github and used the downloads feature having a compiled downloadable file alongside the source to me feels out of scope for what Github is. To me this change is exactly that: Github focusing on their core strength: source control hosting.
As far as I can see "compiled downloadable files" are not really what most people use downloads for.
More often, it's used for source distributions which just want to add a few tweaks to make things easier for downloaders (pre-generate a configure file, etc).
No, it's not "welcome", because separate "downloads" are (1) no burden on people who don't use them, and (2) actually a useful feature.
In many cases, a tarball of the repo contents isn't the same thing as a distribution tarball, because the latter often contains various generated files that may be more annoying for the user to generate than is justified for somebody just interested in compiling and installing the software. Making a distribution tarball typically involves generating those things and packaging them together with the sources.
Some repos contains generated files as well to work around the issue, but this is ugly and causes its own problems.
> Github are nailing it
Er, removing useful features may be good from a business point of view (github may feel the support burden, etc, isn't justified by the usefulness), but I don't think it deserves to be called "nailing it" (unless "it" is the user, of course... :] )....