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Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users

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Re: Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users

#66

Post by nnq »

cjbarber wrote: post #31
jmduke wrote: post #29

I just had a glimpse of a wonderful future where GitHub releases a payments system, packaging options, and suddenly becomes an ideal app store ecosystem.

With their recent $100mm round, they might be working on this already. Could lead to an interesting future of software selling/piracy, where those that will buy, buy, and those that are desperate not to can git clone make clean; make install

This can't really work on the long run / at scale, ya know... Someday someone will make a script that does the equivalent of the above, then somebody will make an alternative app-store GUI that leverages that script to get anything that's open-source for free. And you can't really sell as SaaS classic closed source and (b) pay for subscription / user account (ok, there are the adds/in-app-purchases financed ones and they could profit from the "paid open source model").

Re: Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users

#67

Post by ksec »

fudged71 wrote: post #56
conroy wrote: post #6

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

Having the download buttons listed like that baffles me. Many downloads have similar names, and having them in a vertical list is far easier for determining which one you're supposed to get.

My thoughts exactly.

Re: Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users

#68

Post by reidrac »

Something like this was missing since they removed the uploads [1].

Basically a release bundle may not be exactly the same stuff you have in your source code repository. You may need to generate documentation, configure files, run setup.py sdist or whatever, so a release may not be exactly a snapshot of your git repo.

So this is perfect. Great feature GitHub, thanks!

It would be nice that tags != releases though, because I can think of scenarios where you may add a tag that is not meant to be a release (ie. security update, you may want to tag the commit with a CVE).

Also it would be great if you could just link or display the changelog, CHANGES or NEWS instead of writing a text describing the release. That's for projects that already have a release procedure, but for the rest this is HUGE change because GitHub just improved their project management! I love it!

[1]: https://github.com/blog/1302-goodbye-uploads

Re: Releases – a workflow for shipping software to end users

#70

Post by Kiro »

foca wrote: post #48
Kiro wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you ever do that instead of just download as zip or clone?

For JavaScript or CSS single-file projects it's actually quite simpler to wget the one file from the Raw URL (or copy-paste the contents into a new buffer in your editor), than to clone/download the archive and then move the file from the downloaded directory and then clean up the other downloaded files. edit For example, `curl https://raw.github.com/documentcloud/backbone/master/backbon... > js/lib/backbone-min.js`

Thanks, but why would Releases solve this?
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