What is the best way to distribute a binary of my project on GitHub?

Question

I have a small github repo to convert MS Word Documents, but most people will just want the binary.

Should I

• Reorganise my repo to have a src/

Answer 1

Probably not what you want to hear, but in your case this is mostly personal preference.

You don't have to store the binary in the repo, because it is no important dependency. It is the other way around: everything you need to recreate the file should be in your repository (including Makefiles/project files).

You can store the binary in the repo because it is fairly small. You should not store it in the repository when the overall size in the repository (base size + diffs, depending how big the diffs are) is overwhelming, but this does not seem to be the case (500 KiB according to your repo).

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My personal preference is to never store generated files (binaries, but also generated text files) in the repo. Possibly because I have experience with 2 GiB csv repositories that take ages to pull. (to be fair: it also takes ages to compile)

For my github project I created a subdomain on some webspace where I put all my downloads and the index page of that subdomain forwards to my github-pages. The github pages link to the downloads on my webspace subdomain. Just because I like my github subdomain a bit more for this project.

My tool works for different platforms though, so not every user needs every binary file. The binaries actually are backends (therefore dependencies), but interchangeable/optional

You can have a look at my setup.