What is considered the best practice for deleting older GitHub code releases? I have 11 releases currently, and older ones are very outdated regarding bugs, data structures and functionality. I was considering deleting releases that were over 1 year old.
2 Answers
Usually people just leave them. It can be useful for folks to have older releases for the purposes of reproducible builds, hash verification, code archaeology, and other historical reasons. This is especially true if release tarballs contain materials that are generated.
It is typically understood that older versions of a piece of software may contain bugs and may have more problems than up-to-date versions and that people use them at their own risk.
It's best practice to leave your GitHub releases up indefinitely. People won't search out the old releases to actually use in day to day practice, but they can be useful in certain circumstances.
Aside from the reasons bk2204 mentioned, it's often the case that software will drop support for older OS and library configurations, or old file formats as it goes along and continues to get developed. Having access to old versions of a piece of software can save someone a lot of time who wants to open up an old file on an old OS to export it to a more compatible format.
If your software interfaces directly with other software, that goes doubly so. Users may need the legacy version of your software to be able to properly use it alongside the legacy version of a different piece of software.
In summary, there are so many reasons people might need access to old releases that it makes sense to keep them up forever.
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