Glad someone else acknowledges this.. the number of times I&#x27;ve had to answer questions about how to get automake to work, etc., from people who should be just downloading the tar and running `.&#x2F;configure`.  People are starting to get this tendency to check out the whole repository just to <i>use</i> the software.  (I&#x27;ve been guilty of this too!  There is something about it..)  But people: If you&#x27;re not going to work <i>on</i> the software, use the release distributions!<p>In one project I went as far as making a &quot;releases&quot; branch, and actually putting the &quot;make dist&quot; output there, in full, and tagging <i>that</i> instead of the master branch.  This was a pretty good compromise, since the github download link now points at the actual release tarball, and you can easily see from `gitk` which commit from the development branch each releases branches from.<p>However, it&#x27;s annoying not to be able to use tags as a way of navigating the development branch, and since I wasn&#x27;t the one officially putting together final releases, eventually it was found that this was just too complicated to keep doing for each release.  And it&#x27;s just a dumb trick to satisfy github&#x27;s weird releases interface anyway, so I couldn&#x27;t justify the complexity.