I have a package that depends on a subdirectory of a release of a GitHub project. The GitHub release format is convenient — it’s provided as a tar.gz file, which Artifacts supports! That’s all fine.
The expanded artifact directory for this artifact is like half a GB. I only care about one directory within the artifact: ~20 MB.
Forgetting licenses / permissions for modifying the artifact, is deleting part of the artifact directory after downloading supported behavior?
Artifacts are content-addressed, so changing the content is a very bad idea. No, artifacts are supposed to be immutable by design.
Also using the github-generated tarball is a terrible idea as it isn’t guaranteed to be immutable, so downloading such artifact from github (if you don’t go through PkgServer) might fail in the future.
Does this apply to Github Gists too? Thinking of GitHub - JuliaPackaging/ArtifactUtils.jl: A tool for package developers for working with artifacts., which has a very convenient workflow to create artifacts as gists.