> Indeed. The proper thing (also read as: the friendliest way for distro packagers) is for software projects to generate and publish a tarball themselves as part of their tag+release process.

And this is easy enough to do automatically with GitHub actions, I have a workflow [1] which runs on each release to create a stable archive of the source and attaches it to the release.

[1] https://github.com/elesiuta/picosnitch/blob/master/.github/w...