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Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure some people will find a way to complain about this, but this is a welcome removal. I can't really think of any instance where I've seen downloads used in a Github repository in a very long time, especially considering you can generate a ZIP file of any repository by doing this to the end of the repository URL: /archive/master.zip the downloads functionality has always felt redundant anyway.

If you need a compiled binary, you should be getting it from the official website or Bittorrent not expecting it to be up on Github already compiled considering Github is all about collaboration and source control not a file hosting service.

Two changes in one day, Github are nailing it.

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> this is a welcome removal

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.

why can't those projects simply host the downloads in the actual repository? its just a binary file, and the link to the raw file can be generated quite easily. For example: https://github.com/joelgwebber/xna-platformer/raw/master/pla...

Because it would make for a terribly annoying history to be adding a build artifact along with every commit (and repo bloat)

Then why not in a separate repo specifically made for hosting your compiled software? Or only include a build for stable releases?

It's a hack, sure, but it's necessary if those small projects don't want to put up an official site or host on S3.

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.

Thats unfounded, patronising and plain rude.

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).

So distribute the files using the github pages feature.

>If you need a compiled binary, you should be getting it from the official website

Many projects use Github pages as the official website, Twitter Bootstrap for example. What should they be expected to do? Distribute via BitTorrent and hope everybody that wants to use the project has a torrent client installed (and are able to even use bittorrent at their place of work/school)? It's just not as convenient for maintainers or users, who just want to grab an archive and get on with it.

Bootstrap can be distributed as source. Just download at the last stable tag.

But that isn't true of many other legit open source projects. As others have pointed out: mobile apps, browser extensions, native apps / libraries, etc. are much more readily accessible when distributed as binaries than as source. Most open-source projects don't want to require everyone to learn how to build from source before they're allowed to use the project, and I think that's a good thing.

One other note: last I checked, the auto-generated ZIP/TAR downloads (for tags or master) were completely broken for any repo that uses submodules.

Not everything is distributed as source.

Eg. Android app - source in git repo, apk in download, what's wrong with that?

Or every JavaScript library that has a .min build

  you should

Why do people feel the need to tell others what they should or shouldn't be doing when there clearly isn't a right or wrong way? Some people found it useful, GitHub decided to discontinue the feature but your opinion on what others should be doing isn't relevant. It's certainly closer to their core feature set than web site hosting and I don't anticipate that going away anytime soon.

  you should be getting it from the official website

Oh, so from our GitHub hosted sites?

> I can't really think of any instance where I've seen downloads used in a Github repository in a very long time

Because, from painful experience, programmatically uploading files has been broken often enough.

> considering Github is all about collaboration and source control not a file hosting service

Except that github is offering websites which are great to present small projects - should it cut off these too? (I now believe: yes)

What if the project needs to be compiled?

Then I would imagine the official site would have a downloadable binary already compiled. Github isn't really a place for getting compiled binaries, it's for collaboration and source control. I've never gone to a repository with the intent of being able to download compiled anything, chances are if you're apt enough getting to the repository you'd already know to expect this.

The author or vendor should be supplying a compiled binary for download in my opinion somewhere else like their website or even via Bittorrent.

But Github has been moving more and more to be the site for a project, that's what Github Pages is explicitly for. It was nice to have everything under one place, with one account system. Not unrecoverable, but to me this was a regrettable decision for them to make.

For a lot of projects the gh-pages 'is' the official website. Smaller projects have never (until now) needed another location to host a full project, you may disagree that github aims to be a place to host open source projects but gh-pages, a hosted wiki and issue tracker suggests otherwise.

I don't know about this stuff, so ask in earnest: couldn't such smaller projects upload their compiled installers to some free app hosting service, and link to that from their github site pages?

They can, but it means dealing with another service which is inconvenient, especially for OSS projects

And who's going to pay for my bandwidth?

Maybe the change is to combat those who have been leeching off of Github for free bandwidth. If you're serious about your project and you're consuming enough bandwidth to worry about a big S3 bill, you're probably big enough to be able to afford to pay for bandwidth. S3 is cheap and dead easy to use.

How is using a service that Github provided "leeching"? Is hosting an open source project there also leeching?

GitX, one of the many Git gui frontends for Mac OS X is distributed using the Download mechanism. It allows me, the user to easily download a pre-compiled binary instead of having to download and then build it.

> I can't really think of any instance where I've seen downloads used in a Github repository in a very long time

Good thing you speak for every repo

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