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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> what can I do now that I couldn't already do with Github as is?

Before this new service how would you use GitHub as a source for installing, for example, Maven packages?

There's https://jitpack.io, but it's a third-party service. Having first-party support for Maven artifacts served by GitHub will be quite nice.

I guess I'm not sure how Maven works then -- I thought it was just downloading package binaries? I would use Github releases for that and link to the binary directly. I'd use a CI to auto-build and publish a new release binary whenever I pushed to master.

Does Maven do something more complicated like automatically figure out which platform binary to pull?

It's the file layout, for just one thing. You can't just point Maven (or many package managers) at a simple HTTP server without the correct layout.

If you could... they wouldn't have built this.

Can't you? http://repo.maven.apache.org/maven2/ looks a lot to me like a simple HTTP server.

I'll take your word on it though. I don't know much about how Java package management works, and like you said, I assume the Github team wouldn't waste their time building something that wasn't necessary.

I guess if nothing else it would be a pain in the neck to have to know in advance how release files had to be laid out.

> ...without the correct layout

How are you going to recreate that directory structure with GitHub releases? You can't even have any custom directories - they're just release-name/file-name.

I mean just try recreating it yourself and see how far you get.

You could try use GitHub pages instead, but GitHub very actively pester you if it even looks like you're distributing binaries there.

> Before this new service how would you use GitHub as a source for installing, for example, Maven packages?

http://www.lordofthejars.com/2011/09/questa-di-marinella-e-l...

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