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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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... :] )....