Launchpad should make tarballs of branches available for download

[Graham Binns]

What happens:
If a developer creates a project and then pushes a trunk branch to it, they don't get a "Download this" button on the front page. They could get that button (which is very useful to have for project where people aren't interested in getting the code using bzr) by adding a download file, but that requires a release to be created, even if they're not ready to release code yet.

What should / could happen:
If a project has a trunk branch registered but no releases or download files, Launchpad should build a tarball of that trunk branch and offer it for download via the project overview page. This download file would be superseded by any releases with download files attached (or could be offered alongside any releases with download files).

This would be a nice feature, because it removes the need for the user to generate a tarball, add a release and then upload the tarball (especially since that's quite a complex and hard-to-discover process - see bug 161187).

[EmmaJane (emmajane)]

+1 for no manual creation of tarballs.

[Jonathan Lange (jml)]

Possibly a dupe of bug 325761

[Aaron Bentley (abentley)]

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Jonathan Lange wrote:
> Possibly a dupe of bug 325761

I don't think they're similar enough at this point to call them dupes,
but a solution for one bug might close both.

Aaron
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[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

Would certainly be nice to have this.

[snowdrop (snowdrop)]

Sourceforge + SVN has had this for ages and it is _really_ usefull:

If one wants to share the /trunk with the world and mortals it's really annoying to have to manually tar the /trunk yourself and then upload it somewhere, On top of that, this manually created package is also outdated with the next push that's done.

Sourceforge allows a person that browses the trunk to download it by simply clicking a link, neatly wrapped up in a tar. The main point in having the trunk easily available would of course be to let people take a look at the project without having to checking it out and learning / installing a VCS to begin with.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

See also bug 240580.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

There is a patch for this, if anyone would like to finish it off

https://code.launchpad.net/~xaav/loggerhead/export-tarball/+merge/66408