Re: Embracing github.com

On 2018-03-22, Bryan Stansell wrote:
> I wanted to let everyone know that I've converted the conserver releases
> into a git repository and pushed it to github.  You can find it here:
>
> https://github.com/conserver/conserver
>
> You can now clone, fork, submit PRs, open issues, etc just like all the
> other cool kids these days.  ;-)
>
> I've been meaning to move things into a git repo for quite a while, but
> the stability of the code (aside from the one major issue with recent
> openssl libraries - any openssl experts out there?) has kept me from
> doing it.  Now I'm on a "simplification" kick and looking to github to
> manage the lifecycle of the software.  The next step will be to update
> docs to point at github and start accumulating any issues and patches
> there.  And if you need to pull tarballs, that's where to go now!

I have a request (I maintain the conserver port on OpenBSD).

Would it be possible to add uploaded tarballs as "assets" to the github
releases please?

The automatic "source code (tar.gz)" links on the releases page are to
files which are automatically generated by git-archive and then cached
for an unknown time. As confirmed by a github developer in private mail
they're subject to change if they update their software stack, so aren't
ideal for OS packagers who verify that downloaded files haven't changed.

In the past github tried to keep these a bit more stable (including
locally backing out changes to software they use affecting the files)
but they seem to have stopped this now, we've been seeing checksum
failures quite often recently in files distributed this way (even with
files downloaded at the same time, but presumably from different github
clusters).

The manual method is on https://help.github.com/articles/creating-releases/
(note step 7), it can be automated too - various examples of this are at
https://gist.github.com/stefanbuck/ce788fee19ab6eb0b4447a85fc99f447 and
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40733692/github-upload-release-assets-with-bash

To show how it looks, here are a few other projects doing this:

https://github.com/libevent/libevent/releases
https://github.com/jedisct1/libsodium/releases
https://github.com/irssi/irssi/releases

Thanks
Stuart <sthen@openbsd.org>