GitHub is a terrible upstream

[Patrick Monnerat]

On Mon, 2012-04-23 at 14:27 +0100, Adam Williamson wrote: 
> On Fri, 2012-04-20 at 20:51 -0700, Eric Smith wrote:
> > Corey Richardson wrote:
> > > Getting source tarballs from github is a nightmare. See
> > > http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2011-February/148676.html

I noticed putting what you want after .../tarball/XXXX has no effect,
thus I have good results by using URLs like:

https://github.com/user/app/tarball/gittag/user-app-gittag.tar.gz

where user and app identify the repository target and gittag is the hex
code of the desired commit. This satisfies rpmbuild and the URL is
valid.

The downloaded tar contains everything under directory user-app-gittag.

Of course, this works as long as the target data (i.e.: repository)
lives on github :-/

Patrick