Yeah I'm surprised to see them essentially drop support for this common workflow... downloading auto-tarballed tagged SCM commits is insufficient for Autotools

Yeah I'm surprised to see them essentially drop support for this common workflow... downloading auto-tarballed tagged SCM commits is insufficient for Autotools projects, or other situations where you need to do pre-processing on your source code with (potentially fragile / version sensitive) tools which you don't want to require your end users to have installed. It's not like inexpensive file hosting is difficult to come by these days, thankfully. And it's probably better for one's main distribution site to be on a domain under one's own control, anyway. But it was more convenient to be able to just put it up on GitHub, and somewhat more inspiring of confidence in the source archive's integrity. I wonder how much this feature was costing them, anyway? And whether they'll lose out in any significant way when links to projects' canonical release archives point away from GitHub...