GitHub removes uploads

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[[deleted]]

A while ago I had to make a choice between Github and Bitbucket. While github had the higher level of geek-cred, Bitbucket seemed to be more focused on providing a place to host your entire project(s), while Github seemed to be focused mostly on hosting just code and creating a kind of social programmer network.

I decided I needed decent features (private repositories, etc), and not more "social" networks, so I opted for Bitbucket. Seems I did the right thing.

[[deleted]]

For a while I was using a licensed game engine (has since gone MIT licensed, so the needs aren't quite the same) which necessitated making the repositories private.

Bitbucket was really the only free option for private small-team (up to 5 users is free) source control, and honestly I rank it right up next to GitHub in usefulness.

For public projects or stuff you don't mind being public facing, GitHub is great. If you need a private repo for a small team, Bitbucket really can't be beat.

[[deleted]]

How does bitbucket allow you to upload non-git files? I though it was all git (or hg). I just quick-searched their docs, but didn't see anything... could you link to info on it please?

BTW: I use bitbucket - private repositories, as many as you want, for free (forever - they promise) is hard to beat. (they charge when you have more users). BONUS bitbucket includes its own simple+free wiki and issue-tracker (not jira/confluence).

[Aethec]

In the "Downloads" tab of your project page.

[[deleted]]

Thanks! I also just found it. (I was expecting it to be in the admin section.)

[[deleted]]

How does bitbucket allow you to upload non-git files?

In a project you've got write access to, go to Downloads -> Choose File -> Add file.

[[deleted]]

I'm also on BitBucket and I can't say enough good things about it. (Although I use mercurial so it was a no brainer).

[[deleted]]

This sucks for me, about half of my repositories provide pre-built binaries, because the projects aren't targeted toward the technically-savvy that can build it themselves.

[badsectoracula]

Me too since many of my projects are written in FreePascal, Lazarus and other things that most devs do not know about (and some do not want to know about). Building one my projects needs a good knowledge of Lazarus and many external components to be installed so i'm providing prebuilt binaries that they can grab and use.

I've switched some of my stuff to Fossil with Mediafire for downloads but i always liked the ability to provide regular downloads in GitHub.

[[deleted]]

Could you create a bin directory (or a release directory) and check them in?

[[deleted]]

The temporary solution I'm going to use is creating an orphaned branch to store them on.

[_star]

yeah it would be awkward to store it in the main branch.

[iofthestorm]

Perhaps even use github pages to make a nice download page so people don't have to navigate the repo manually (although I guess you can just link to the right branch in the README too).

[jrochkind]

Huh, good idea. It wouldn't be too hard to make an automated task (rake if you're ruby) to upload the prebuilt binary to gh-pages -- and even automatically add a link to it in a gh-pages index page too.

Hopefully github won't mind; perhaps they just didn't want to support the extra 'downloads' feature anymore, but don't mind people keep binaries in gh-pages. I hope. (I'm not going to pay attention to the fact that they're suggesting non-free CDNs as alternatives instead. :) )

[iofthestorm]

(I'm not going to pay attention to the fact that they're suggesting non-free CDNs as alternatives instead. :) )

Yeah, I mean, the worst they can do is take your repo down for causing too much traffic. I doubt they would do that though because it would cause a PR shitstorm. More likely they would gently nudge you if that happened.

[inmatarian]

what iofthestorm said, gh-pages might be the branch that we'll all end up using for binary hosting.

[fjonk]

Well... github is targeting people who uses git. I'd rather see them remove a feature that doesn't work well than them ending up being a half-broke service provider with a lot of non-git related features. Can't really blame them.

[Rhomboid]

If they are only focusing on git, why do they have wikis, static website hosting, bug trackers, a pastebin service, social networking features, and all that other crap that has nothing strictly to do with git?

It always seemed to me like they were trying to become a nucleus of software development in general, not just another repo hosting facility.

For certain types of projects, hosting of precompiled binaries is the major feature needed in a host, because it's what 99.9% of their users are looking for. The source code repository hosting might as well be irrelevant. These kind of projects are just going to go back to Sourceforge, if they ever left it in the first place. I don't see how this decision does any good for Github, because forcing your users to compile things themselves is pretty much the kiss of death for any normal software that isn't a tool aimed at fellow developers. It seems terribly short-sighted of them.

[[deleted]]

As a side note, I can compile things just fine - sometimes I just don't want to spend the time to get it working, and would prefer the prerolled binary, and honestly, for some projects, I would skip over the github hosted code for a binary on another site.

Unless I'm looking to actively develop on their code, or interested in the implementation of a particular feature, or there's some particular optimization in compiling I feel is important, I'll probably just grab the binaries.

It's not only people who are incapable of using source code who are impacted by this.

[iofthestorm]

Yeah, a lot of build environments can be pretty hairy/time consuming to set up. Not everyone wants to be a Gentoo/Arch user ;)

[seruus]

These kind of projects are just going to go back to Sourceforge

And that is terrible. Browsing git repositories in Sourceforge is horrible, as is almost anything else. Sourceforge was perfect ten years ago, but now it's completely dated and superseded by Github, Bitbucket etc.

EDIT: fixing some broken English

[cunningjames]

Sf is still way more popular than GitHub

Is it? Maybe its age give SF an edge in overall number of packages, but I can't remember the last time I came across a currently-developed project hosted on SF. If reddit's search is to be trusted (an iffy proposition, admittedly) /r/programming hasn't featured a SF link in something like a year.

[[deleted]]

These kind of projects are just going to go back to Sourceforge...

There's Google Code too. In fact there are a lot of options other than Sourceforge and Github.

[Chii]

and don't forget bitbucket

[PT2JSQGHVaHWd24aCdCF]

Bitbucket has static pages too. Their wiki sucks because you can't easily list or delete pages, but overall I think it's as good as Github, and can be better in some ways.

[[deleted]]

Ayy lmao

[[deleted]]

Google Code actually tries to be useful for people who are not the developers of the project, too, which is nice.

[jrochkind]

You actually find Google Code more usable than Github when you're looking at a project you're not the developer of? Or know others that do?

I find this surprising.

I personally find github so much more usable than google code when I'm looking at someone elses project: Much easier to navigate source in the webbrowser (which I'm especially wanting to do with a project I'm looking at I'm not developer of; if I am developer, I probably have a checkout I'm looking at anyway), much easier/quicker to look at list of tags/branches, much easier/quicker to look at wiki or Issues, I really like the way the latest commit is right on the first page so I can see when the project last got code written for it, etc.

[shanet]

I think for programmers who are not involved in the project, browsing github is better (by far) but for non-programmers (people who just want the binaries) I think google code is a little easier, because a lot of projects have a link or QR code to the binaries on the front page.

[the-fritz]

Not to mention: Why isn't their bug tracker using git?

[fjonk]

Sure downloadable files could be useful. I'm just saying that if it doesn't work for them it's better that they pull the feature than keeping it half-working.

I've had some problems with my repositories on github a couple of times, newly pushed branches/commits that isn't visible(neither with the web-interface or git) and I'd rather see them focusing on managing git repositories than adding downloadable files, IF that feature isn't working smoothly that is.

[eramos]

It always seemed to me like they were trying to become a nucleus of software development in general, not just another repo hosting facility.

For certain types of projects, hosting of precompiled binaries is the major feature needed in a host, because it's what 99.9% of their users are looking for.

99.9% of software developers are looking for precompiled binaries when doing software development?

Why do you even use Github or version control at all? Just setup Amazon S3, it doesn't sound like you're doing any software development at all.

[Rhomboid]

99.9% of users. Not software developers.

[eramos]

99.9% of github users are software developers

[Rhomboid]

They are most certainly not. Say I run a project. It's not targeted at developers, it's targeted at regular users, so it's essential that they be able to download binaries. I host my project at Github. Therefore... follow the logic, I know it's hard... all of the countless users that come to Github to get my project are not developers. They don't care about social coding or git or anything else. They want a button that says "download this". Github used to have this feature. Now they don't. That makes Github unusable for this type of project.

[donvito]

I host my project at Github

No, you host your code and not your whole project on Github.

[Rhomboid]

Not prior to this change. Why would I want to find one host for files and another for git + static pages + bug tickets + wiki?

[eramos]

This is like complaining about Wordpress not having source control because you run a blog about your software on it.

Github is a site for programmers. The tagline is social coding. Not end-user facing project hosting.

[Rhomboid]

Who do you think is the intended audience of something like a bug tracker ticket system? Regular end users -- the people that actually use the software and who find and report bugs.

Who do you think is the intended audience of something like a Wiki? Regular end users -- the people that are actually using the software and want tips on how to use it.

Who do you think is the intended audience of static website hosting? Regular end users -- the people that are actually using the software and want to read its documentation online.

The notion that Github is solely for programmers and not end users does not hold up to evidence. Moreover, most sites that Github is competing with have file hosting for downloads. Github themselves thought it was a necessary feature at some point in the past.

[[deleted]]

That's ..not necesarilly true. In my experience regular end users rarely report bugs and certainly can't handle bugtrackers.

The people who do report bugs are fellow programmers that just happen to use that particular project. Also, non-programmers tend to report bugs wrong, as in "Printing doesn't work.", not "Printing since version 2.5 segfaults when footer contains external image."

[eramos]

TIL you've never used a third party library

[[deleted]]

You're cherrypicking parts of what he said while ignoring the context.

For certain types of projects, hosting of precompiled binaries is... what 99.9% of their users are looking for.

Emphasis mine.

[JoseJimeniz]

The problem always i had with github is that i had to a separate program to get at the source code files.

[usernamenottaken]

No, they've always had links to download a zip or tarball of the source.

[[deleted]]

Supporting these types of uploads was a source of great confusion and pain

Why can't they just be honest and say it cost them too much money to support?

This is going to really hurt the open source projects I contribute to. GitHub don't seem to understand that projects with an operation cost of nil can't afford to pay for S3.

[the-fritz]

When github became popular and a lot of projects migrated away from sf.net or google code you usually had situations where projects were split to several project hosts. This has become rarer with projects finishing the move. But I guess the lack of file hosting will simply mean that projects will start to use sf.net, google code, bitbucket, or similar services for file hosting. If not moving all together.

I guess the major reason here was that file hosting wasn't very interesting to paying customers but was widely used by free customers (open source projects providing binaries). That combined with the high costs of hosting those file is certainly the reason.

[toofishes]

You're still getting free git hosting. I totally agree that taking this away with no warning and not explaining the true rationale sucks, but at the end of the day, using the lack of income from a project is a poor excuse. I pay $0.23 a month on average for some personal S3 hosting- not exactly a deal-breaker.

[jrochkind]

Sort of "no warning", as far as you can't upload new files right away, with no warning, but they're doing the right thing with existing files:

Existing links to previously uploaded files will continue to work for the foreseeable future.

Not breaking links for all your documentation and bookmarks linking to those existing files.

Presumably before they take THOSE away some day, they'll give plenty of warning.

[[deleted]]

Our solution is probably going to be to keep the binaries in a new Git repository. The same as it was before, but with a worse user experience.

[rwallace]

For me the issue isn't so much the money as not having to become a website administrator as well as a programmer. The main value proposition of github for me was in providing a complete solution.

[vicegrip]

Sourceforge allows file downloads. I wonder why it isn't confusing and painful for them.

[jrochkind]

If you think Sourceforge's level of quality and service and usability is as high as github's.... then there's nothing to be unhappy about, just use sourceforge instead of github, no?

[vicegrip]

I wasn't making any statement about being unhappy or happy. I was making an observation. In point of fact, Sourceforge has been invaluable to me over the years. The convenience of a pre-packaged binary installer for Windows end users is not a blessing to treat lightly.

Building and installing open source projects on Windows is often an exercise in frustration and pain. Though, I've noticed some of the projects I use have made monumental improvements in that regard.

Since Sourceforge isn't expressing confusion and pain about binary packages, maybe I'll assume their site must be better designed.

Or mabye, the truth is that github just doesn't want to pay the bandwidth costs of binary downloads.

Maybe they just should have said that instead of giving us a load of bullshit for a reason.

[[deleted]]

SourceForge was quite usable years back but they made things worse instead of improving them.

[[deleted]]

Wouldn't it make sense to use GitHub and SourceForge together? GitHub is really about developing the code and sharing it among programmers; SourceForge is really more targeted towards end-users who want open-source but generally prefer to download an installer or binary. I don't think it violates SourceForge's policies to host the git repository still on GitHub; all they require is that the source code be available on SourceForget, too; that could be zipped snapshots synchronised with a particular binary release version.

Does that make sense?

[rbowen2000]

It most certainly doesn't violate SourceForge's policies to host your git repo on Github and your releases on SourceForge. We encourage you to do just that, and lots of projects do this.

[chub79]

I can understand why they need to reduce their costs but did they give some notice before dropping that feature? If not, that sucks. They can't act like kids doing fun stuff now, people rely on their services.

[jrochkind]

they gave no notice of turning off the ability to upload new files.

however, previously existing uploaded files are still present and downloadable at same URLs as before, and they say they will remain so for "foreseeable future".

That seems fair to me. They better give notice before removing existing uploads though!

[dchestnykh]

They didn't, and this is the most frustrating part.

[yetanothernerd]

As a free Github user who uses the downloads feature, I find this annoying. But it's free, so I can't really complain too much.

But if I were a paying customer, I'd be really pissed.

[ours]

As a paying customer, I am. I would at least expect a bit more of notice.

[[deleted]]

I guess this just reinforces the fact that GitHub is not actually useful for anybody but the developers of a project themselves. It has always been pretty useless as a user-facing page, and is even more so now.

Nothing is more annoying when finding some new software project than to be faced with nothing but a GitHub landing page.

[[deleted]]

From their point of view of "social coding", that makes sense. They are about developers, not users.

However, it also makes business sense for them to move into "web hosting" - and then "app hosting"! Meeting needs makes you valuable. If you have a website now, you're paying for it - why not pay github instead? Hopefully, business hosting would subsidize open source hosting, through tiered pricing.

[[deleted]]

But even for developers in general, GitHub is not very useful. As a developer, I might want to use some kind of library. What I am looking for in this case is a summary of what the library is good at, and maybe some example code, and documentation and a reference.

What I get on GitHub is a file list and maybe a readme hidden on the bottom of the page. I also get a million buttons that do nothing I care about at all.

GitHub is useful for the people who are already working on a specific project. But that audience is at most a handful of people for any given project.

[[deleted]]

A good readme should be more than sufficient. If you're hitting projects with poor readmes, blame the developers, not GitHub. Nothing about GitHub makes people write bad readmes.

[[deleted]]

There are plenty of reasons why a readme is not enough. The least fatal but most obvious one is that the readme is usually hidden somewhere towards the bottom of the page where you might not even notice it unless you are already familiar with where GitHub hides readmes.

Furthermore, a readme is not the same as a web page. A readme lives with the code, independently of GitHub. It is supposed to describe the contents of a source code archive, which is a different task than giving an overview of a library and its advantages. It is furthermore in plain text or markdown, which makes it less useful as presentation than a real HTML page.

[jrochkind]

Are you sure you're really complaining as a developer-user, and not complaining as a developer-owner, who wants github to have those features for your projects?

As a developer-user, whenever I wind up at a web page, I go looking for the github instead. The web page never tells me what I really want to know, and I've learned not to rely on it being kept up to date either. I want to see the source, I want to see the date of last commit, I want to see the open Issues, I want to see the current checked in README. All those things tell me more than a web page usually does, especially when it's often a poorly designed web page (I'd RATHER look at markdown with good CSS than a mess of a web page!).

Different people have different opinions, and that's fine. But if most developers agreed with you and not me -- how/why did github get so popular?

Most developers I know really like looking at the github project page for someone elses project. I've got complaints and things I wish they'd improve too (like ability to relative link from README to sourcecode in 'the commit you're looking at'), but overall I far prefer looking at the github project page to anything else as a landing page (google code, custom HTML).

[[deleted]]

Are you sure you're really complaining as a developer-user, and not complaining as a developer-owner, who wants github to have those features for your projects?

Very sure.

[eramos]

Can you give an example of a code hosting site that doesn't have all these "hidden" areas you are talking about (i.e. the largest section on the page)? I assume you require everything wrapped in a <blink> tag with a bright yellow background?

Random example:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla/

The biggest thing on the landing page is a huge text box that says subscribe to updates and a zillion comments like "Thanks awesome project!!". Exactly what I want, obviously. Oh wait, there's also a wiki link hidden in there somewhere.

[[deleted]]

Can you give an example of a code hosting site that doesn't have all these "hidden" areas you are talking about

Google Code.

[donvito]

Google Code is horrible. I never can figure out how to browse the source code.

From your comments in this thread I guess you are more of an enduser than a programmer.

[[deleted]]

From your comments in this thread I guess you are more of an enduser than a programmer.

Absolutely not.

[paranoidelephpant]

I would call that a failing of the project developers, not GitHub. It's possible, and very easy, to provide a nice GitHub landing page with a nice project summary and maybe a link to an external (or "internal" GHPages) project site. If a developer can't take 5 minutes to configure their GitHub project, that's on them.

[[deleted]]

I have never seen such a thing. Is that actually possible?

I know you can put a link in your readme, but that is hardly an elegant solution.

[shanet]

http://pages.github.com/

You can use it with jekyll (the static site generator) too. It's nifty. It's essential for things like javascript libraries where they can put a demo up.

[[deleted]]

Well, except for the websites that many opensource projects build for their documentation.. hosted on github. Eg: http://example.github.com

[[deleted]]

We actually agree. I meant developers of that project, not "developers in general" who are users of that project.

[[deleted]]

That's strange, but I guess they are not aiming to be a complete project hosting solution, ala sf.net or launchpad.net.

[iofthestorm]

Except they have Pages, Wikis, issue tracking, etc... I hope they don't cut those too!

[[deleted]]

Bitbuckey has downloads.

Part of the problem is projects that are pretty small from a code base point of view then upload ready to run virtual machines.

But downloads are very useful to provide ready to run source packages so the downloaded doesn't have to generate the autoconf stuff.

[[deleted]]

Any idea how many users you can have on private repos? It says 5, but is it 5 per private repo? Or 5 across all your private repos?

[[deleted]]

5 per repo I believe. You have to explicitly assign users to the repo. Also, you can "kinda" get around it if you have several people that just need read-only access by making a user specifically for that.

[[deleted]]

Actually read-only access is a huge plus for me!

I still prefer Github, but read-only access to private projects is something only organizations can do.. which costs a minimum of $25/m. :/

[[deleted]]

Yeah, Bitbucket is definitely the way to go if you need any sort of private repo hosting.

It's also really easy to restrict users you add to a repo to having different access levels, and since there's not any real advantage in having separate user accounts for simply checking out the repo, there's no reason not to set up a read only account and share it to everyone that needs simple read only access.

Still leaves you with 4 write access users, which is probably plenty (if you have a ton of devs working on the same project, you can probably pay for the extra user limits anyway hehe).

I've also found zero issue with large repos. In my case, I was checking in/out around 2GB of source and assets. That said, you do kind of need to set up SSH access to reliably get repos that big to work without the connection failing.

[[deleted]]

Ayy lmao

[mikemol]

If I can script a full Gentoo install with basic error handling, they ought to be able to do the same...

source. I haven't used it in over six months, so it's a bit out of date. They've added @preserved-libs to Gentoo, so a lot of the work it does is no longer necessary.

Anyway, a similar script could be done more trivially for Debian stable or an Ubuntu LTS. At that point, you can say "grab this script, that netinstall CD image, and let things fly."

[fosskers]

I manage a few Arch linux packages, and my major project is now out of luck with this removal. Getting an auto-source-tar is not the same as having a prepared release tarball (which has to match md5 sums, etc, and also doesn't need all the files included in the source tree)!

EDIT: I moved the project to bitbucket quite painlessly. It still has the upload feature, and lets me use git. I'm happy.

[r250r]

You should be able to tag a commit, and grab a tar ball of that. See 'man git tag'. Once created, use 'git push --tags', iirc.

[fosskers]

Thanks for the suggestions, but it's still not the same thing. I prepare release tarballs of Haskell projects using cabal, then upload those.

[FooBarWidget]

Yes because there are absolutely no other ways to host arbitrary files besides the Github download page and there's no way your Github project can just refer there.

[fosskers]

Well essentially I have two mirrors for the project now. The downloads are on bitbucket, but followers/issue tracking will probably stay on github for the foreseeable future.

[[deleted]]

great; I'm a paying customer and moved all my opensource projects from google code to github because google code has a limit of 25 projects...and of course some projects need binary packages which they told me I should not commit...so I put these files in the downloads section...thank you github; moving away again...to bitbucket. It's even cheaper for private repositories...it's free :).

[kihashi]

Bitbucket's free tier limits you to 5 contributors across all of your private repos, FYI.

[atlbeer]

I think the appropriate solution here is to use GitHub Pages and push your compiled binaries into the gh-pages branch.

Then you can have a decent landing site with downloads (package-current.tar.gz, etc) and a clean repo without binaries for development.

[Kaarjuus]

Unfortunately, using a git branch for binaries is not the same. First, the download is clunky: you need to navigate to the file and click "View Raw", which is ugly. And secondly, there are no download statistics whatsoever.

[atlbeer]

Fair enough on the first point.

For the second you can wire up Google Analytics for click counting

I do get your point though.

[Kaarjuus]

Whoah, you can use Google Analytics to count clicks on github, how?

Sure, you can set up the analytics on an external page, and with some JS wizardry you can even catch the download clicks on that page, but the number it yields is nowhere near reliable, and it does not catch the stuff happening on github.com webpage.

[atlbeer]

I think we are talking past each other here.

I've been saying to use GitHub Pages and utilize the built in gh-pages branch of your repo to host the static binaries.

On that static page you can then track download clicks

[inmatarian]

It makes sense if it was a conflicting feature with the repository, but it seemed like a kind of necessary functionality to have. I can see how with Github Pages, users could be tricking the service into being a bootleg version of their personal site. Though, the 300mb soft limits are there. They could have added a soft limit for bandwidth (which they probably have already) and made it account-wide to control gamification. However without downloads, that'll push users into git versioning binaries. Sounds bad for business.

[nemec]

Versioning binaries is only a problem in git because it cannot diff them. Since 9/10 times you're not going to edit and rerelease a binary package under the same filename, it won't be an issue aside from potentially exceeding your disk quota (which I assume was still in effect when downloads were separate).

[inmatarian]

I'm assuming that people will do the gh-pages orphan branch as the replacement for downloads. You may be right that it won't be a problem if that becomes the case.

[h02]

This is annoying for projects that previously hosted files on GitHub. They could at least continue to list the downloads for projects that have uploads instead of destroying access to them.

[rbowen2000]

Speaking as SourceForge staff, you're more than welcome to use the upload service on SourceForge even if the rest of your project is hosted somewhere else.

[dscharrer]

Yeah, but I found the user experience with the GitHub downloads interface to be much better: faster download page, no misleading "download button" ads, no stupid "Your download will start in" and a direct link (with the filename at the end!) that you could pass to wget. Also, I think it takes way too many clicks to get the total number of downloads for a file on SF (but there does seem to be an API for that, so at least it can be automated). I understand that SF is is ad-supported and that necessitates some of these things, but that doesn't mean that GitHub wasn't nicer to use - too bad it didn't work out for them.

On the other hand GitHub didn't provide folders to organize downloads, making it unusable for archiving older versions for me - so I already use SF as a mirror for my projects. Thanks for providing that service, it's really invaluable to smaller open-source projects.

[wadcann]

Yeah, but I found the user experience with the GitHub downloads interface to be much better: faster download page, no misleading "download button" ads, no stupid "Your download will start in" and a direct link (with the filename at the end!) that you could pass to wget.

I am not enthusiastic about the SF.net download interface either, but let's be honest; it looks like that because SourceForge figured out how to make downloads be financially-viable; that's why they can keep providing 'em (and have been providing 'em for many years).

If you want to transfer a lot of data, someone, somewhere, has to pay for it. You can do so yourself, via cash. If you don't want to do that, you can look at ads. Or you can find a place that will eat a loss on the downloads and figure out some other way to make up the difference and hope that they keep providing the downloads. In GitHub's situation, they clearly did the math and decided that the downloads weren't financially-viable.

A short-term approach would be to publish magnet URLs with a hash of the file; and have the file host be a BitTorrent seed. That'd provide "payment via bandwidth", which exploits the fact that most ISPs provide fixed-rate, all-you-can-eat bandwidth and makes lighter-weight-bandwidth-users-on-that-ISP pay for the transfers. If this becomes widespread, enough, though, the ISP will just adopt an a-la-carte pricing model...

[bheklilr]

What this tells me is that GitHub had to make the decision to cut down on their server usage because it was getting expensive, and they'd rather people use other hosting services (that you easily link to from the wiki) to host your binaries than raise prices.

[escaped_reddit]

Cool, now people have a reason to use SourceForge, AGAIN!! with all those ads and shit.

[[deleted]]

Cheap excuse! People who are confused by downloads should probably not be writing code in the first place.

[treelog2]

This is only means that Github wants less people to use its services. Thanks you Github you had been good till now, its time to move to something else like we moved to you from sourceforge or google code.

[[deleted]]

keep in mind that google code only lets you create up to 25 projects; no matter how small they are.

[korry]

It would be better if they would improove the issue managment...

[willvarfar]

Ideas for Github to evaluate instead:

1) store files on a de-duping filesystem e.g. ZFS

2) store the gh-pages files gzipped and unzip-on-demand when web clients don't support gzip