[Denvercoder9]

> For literally the entire multi-decade history of open source, the norm has been — for very good reason — that source archives are immutable and will not change.

Well, the norm has been that maintainers generated and distributed a source archive, and that archive being immutable. That workflow is still perfectly fine with GitHub and not impacted by this change.

The problem is that a bunch of maintainers stopped generating and distributing archives, and instead started relying on GitHub to automatically do that for them.

[account42]

> That workflow is still perfectly fine with GitHub

It would be perfectly fine if you could prevent GitHub from linking the autogenerated archives from the releases or at least distinguish them in a way that makes it clear that they are not immutable maintainer-generated archives.

[ilyt]

The problem was people assuming github works like that - saves a archive of every commit, which is obviously silly if you think about it (why save it if you can regenerate it on a whim from any commit you want?)