Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users

Excited for this! No more view raw and save.

wahoo!

I was a vocal critic when GitHub discontinued their downloads product earlier this year. I work on open source projects with compiled binaries. GitHub's answer to distribution had been "Use S3" which I never found satisfactory.

As soon as they release an API, I'll be migrating all my projects over.

EDIT: Just added my first release. Super easy. https://github.com/hawkthorne/tmx2lua/releases

While on the subject: does anyone know a software/service for automating software releases?

I usually perform these steps manually:

create a new tag, merge the “next” branch into the “master” branch, run “make dist” from a clean checkout, do a handful of sanity checks on the result, gpg-sign it, push it into a separate git repository for the website, archive the current docs in the website, update the website’s docs with the new docs, send posts to a mailing list, twitter, google+, update the changelog with a placeholder for the new version.

I realize not 100% of that is reasonably automatable, but is there anything which tries to tackle this problem?

By the time you would work out how to automate this process in some tool so it adapts to your requirements, you could write your own build script doing exactly all that.