GitHub Hosted upstream 'Source0'

BJ Dierkes wdierkes at 5dollarwhitebox.org
Tue Feb 15 23:22:45 UTC 2011


Hello all,

I hope I am not the first to come across packaging issues for projects that use GitHub as their upstream source download.  For those not familiar, GitHub dynamically generates downloads for all git 'tags'.  So for example:

$ git tag -a -m 'Tagging 1.0.0' 1.0.0


This would create a tag of '1.0.0' in git.  On GitHub, this tag would be 'downloadable' via a dynamic app such as:

https://github.com/derks/myapp/zipball/1.0.0


This is the upstream URL that a lot of GitHub users are providing rather than a direct download link.  Unfortunately the above is not usable by RPM because rpmbuild expects the URL to end with the file.  If I were to use the above in my spec, I would get an error saying something to the affect of 'unknown source file 1.0.0'.  Additionally, the tarbal that is created looks like:

myapp-1.0.0-XXXXXXX.tar.gz


Where XXXXXXX is the last bit of the git commit hash id... which cause yet another pain in that... you need to update this commit revision every time you update the spec... and it just makes things a bit less fluid.  I'm wondering how other people have resolved these issues for projects using GitHub as the upstream Source0 download provider.

Finally, debian has a web app to resolve these issues at:

http://githubredir.debian.net/


What would be the thoughts of using that to produce more sane/traditional tarbals of upstream GitHub source?

---
derks



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