As a packager of a Linux distribution ( https://www.mageia.org/en/ ), I hereby request the authors of upstream software packages (especially open source ones) to make real releases as standard, compiled-or-built, tarballs and not rely on GitHub’s tagging mechanism for making releases.
The reasons for this are:
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The GitHub releases have a trailing filename of the tag plus “.tar.gz” or “.zip”, not the more standard my-program-x.y.z.tar.gz convention. This makes packaging more difficult.
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The GitHub tarballs do not contain files that are generated by the build system before packaging, that are often necessary to build it properly.
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The GitHub tarballs may contain files that the build system deliberately removes.
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GitHub does not provide downloads in the form of “tar.bz2” or “tar.xz” which are more compact, and so save bandwidth and download time, over “.zip” and “tar.gz”.
What you should do instead is mint a release tar ball, upload it to a standard “http://” website, and give a URL. You can optionally provide hashes (such as MD5, SHA1 or SHA-256), or a PGP signature. Furthermore, you can keep the release tarballs in a separate assets repository (such as this one ), or use something like git-index.
For the record, the originators of the Git version control system (on which git is based), the Linux kernel developers, also provide such release tarballs for git and for the Linux kernel itself, on http://www.kernel.org/ and ftp://ftp.kernel.org/ , so you should follow suit.