[Denvercoder9]

You could also say that some maintainers made that decision for their convenience of not having to build and upload source archives. It is possible to upload your own artifacts to a release on GitHub, and lots of projects do. Those are correctly treated as immutable by GitHub.

[ecnahc515]

I imagine GitHub would be equally upset if every project every started uploading their source tarballs themselves, as presumably the point of their source tarball feature was not needing to store the source tarball for every repository ever, but generating it on demand.

[JonChesterfield]

Bit of a shame they've just provided every project with huge incentive to upload their own source tarballs then. Coming soon, complaints that users upload too many opaque binaries.

[bentley]

GitHub had no releases feature for many years. Most maintainers aren’t aware of the option, and of those who are, I doubt many are even aware that GitHub’s autogenerated tarballs are not stable or that they don’t include submodules.