github: inclusion of release assets in published record

[slint]

It's common for GitHub releases to include release "assets". Since the zipball of the source code is already downloaded, it might be also worth looking at downloading and including the assets in the produced record.

File sizes are limited to 2GB per file, though there's no limit in the number of files, so soe checking is required before attempting to download the assets.

[sdruskat]

If by assets you mean additional files added to a release on GitHub before it is published, that would indeed be a great thing to have!

[luizirber]

Pinging in this issue with an use case: I have a repo for my thesis, and on a new release a PDF with the rendered content is uploaded to the release using GH actions.

I would like to see it show up in the Zenodo record, in the "Files" section.

[CSchoel]

Adding another use case: I have a project for a mathematical model of the AV node which includes reference simulation results as a git submodule. Since GitHub does not include the contents of submodules in the automatically generated zip file of the repository, I have set up a Travis CI script that builds a zip file, which also includes these additional files and is automatically added to the release when a new tag is published.

It would be really nice if this zip file would show up on Zenodo, since automating Zenodo publications was the reason why I added this to the CI script in the first place.

[vivi90]

Pinging in this issue with an use case: I have a repo for my thesis, and on a new release a PDF with the rendered content is uploaded to the release using GH actions.

I would like to see it show up in the Zenodo record, in the "Files" section.

Same for me.

[lorenzleutgeb]

This also helps with computer science conferences that evaluate artifacts. I have code in repo that generates this artifact, and could attach it to a release as well.

[jemissik]

I have a common of use case for which this feature would be very useful:
Many projects include the source files for documentation in the repository, but not a rendered version of the documentation. For example, many of my projects use Sphinx for the documentation pages, which are hosted on Read The Docs and are built there automatically. The documentation source files are kept in the repository, but not a rendered version of the pages. But, I can also include a rendered PDF version of the documentation as a release asset. It would be great if this could be included in the Zenodo archive along with the source code.

[johentsch]

This feature would be essential for archiving our research data, too: Every release results in the creation of a Frictionless datapackage which concatenates all data contained in the repository in a specific way and this datapackage is the principal way that our users interact with the data. It would be very relevant to include these release assets with the files archived on Zenodo and, on top of that, the Frictionless framework allows for loading/accessing/validating these datapackages directly from Zenodo.

Also, this feature could somewhat mitigate #1036, which is another problem we have: Archiving GitHub repositories does not include submodules other than as empty folders. Since our datapackages do, including release assets would solve this problem for us.