I'm getting mixed signals from Github. Are they or are they not trying to be a one-stop-shop for project hosting?
As long as projects need to distribute software that is not code, there will be projects for whom a Github-only solution is inadequate. This opens the door to competitors who are willing to offer "Github, plus that one feature that you really need but that Github doesn't think that you do".
"[...] part of our ongoing effort to keep GitHub focused on building software [...]"
So I suppose that Github Pages and project wikis will soon be gone as well?
All I'm asking is for you to be honest, Github. Just come out and say that the feature was a pain in the ass to support and a looming legal liability.
Honest answer: Because I want to focus on distributing software rather than a generic "one size fits all" (no one) upload anything model. It wasn't a good solution. S3 is a better solution.
Uploads may be going away, but the functionality behind it is being focused in a more usable, elegant way. Case in point: image attachments (the primary use for our uploads section until Friday). Which has all of the legal and support ramifications of the old Uploads section.
It was a great solution for those of us who used it. It was also backed by S3 and Amazon CloudFront (as far as I can tell), and was integrated into the site, rather than being forced onto a wiki page or some such.
For a lot of us, the GitHub page was the project homepage. Now we're going to be forced elsewhere, like BitBucket.
Sorry, but don't think you answered anything at all.
From my own experience and anecdata, software development workflow is not as clear cut as envisaged by github's definition of what constitutes "elegance" or "good solution", but by the constraints faced by the development teams and their internal working framework.
Here's the kicker in your reply, retaining the upload functionality (for images, which can be large in the MB size as well), but removing it just for binaries makes no sense to me.
To me, it looks like a cost issue. File hosting is not free and providing a downloads tab just encourages developers to use them as a filehost, sometimes as the sole one. Removing the tab is a subtle move to tell people to host their files elsewhere. GitHub probably doesn't want to end up like SourceForge, which provides project file hosting except with ads to support the hosting costs. Having advertisements to GitHub seems against the site's nature so by discontinuing the tab they're showing they don't intend on being a filehost anytime soon.
With that said, I would not be surprised if in the future if they reintroduced it as a "new" feature for their enterprise customers. We'll just have to wait a few years ...
Ads are a non-issue here. SO carries job ads, and so does github. " Kabam is hiring: Senior Software Engineer in San Francisco " can be seen on that blog post page. It's something else.
>>> File hosting is not free and providing a downloads tab just encourages developers to use them as a filehost, sometimes as the sole one
IMO, that should not be an issue either. For users (like myself) a binary is the only way to integrate a tool/app into existing workflow to test its efficacy first.
They are plain in the wrong wrong with this move. that's all.
> So I suppose that Github Pages and project wikis will soon be gone as well?
Project wikis are obviously useful in building software. Pages are more for documentation/pitching, but the hosting space for some HTML and images is probably much lower than hosting multiple binaries per project.
Product documentation (wikis) is a very important part of building software. GitHub Pages sure aren't, but they're viewed internally as an addon. There's very little mention of it in the UI.
As long as projects need to distribute software that is not code, there will be projects for whom a Github-only solution is inadequate. This opens the door to competitors who are willing to offer "Github, plus that one feature that you really need but that Github doesn't think that you do".
"[...] part of our ongoing effort to keep GitHub focused on building software [...]"
So I suppose that Github Pages and project wikis will soon be gone as well?
All I'm asking is for you to be honest, Github. Just come out and say that the feature was a pain in the ass to support and a looming legal liability.