Suppress display of automatically added source archives

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Problem to solve

As a Release Manager, I want to control what gets displayed on the Releases page, so my "customers" do not get confused about what source archive they should download. Specifically, I want to prevent the git repository archives from getting displayed. Being able to suppress the "Evidence collection" bit would be nice as well.

The source archives of my project, SANE Backends should contain certain generated files that are not in the git repository before users can build from source. Our Releases page includes uploaded source archives that include these generated files but visitors of that page are confused by the automatically added archives of the git repository.

Intended users

• Rachel (Release Manager)

User experience goal

Rachel should be able to control what is displayed on the Releases pages so that visitors of that page are no longer confused about what they should download to get a complete copy of the source of my project.

Proposal

Add visibility flags to the project Settings.

Further details

My project uses autoconf, automake and related utilities. The developers each use their own versions of these, if at all, and even when using the same versions, the various Linux distribution include patches that lead to slightly different version of the files that these utilities generate. The project used to include the generated files in VCS but that led to spurious churn so it no longer does. People working from a git clone are expected to have the extra utilities installed. However, people who just want to build binaries from the latest, greatest source code should use a source code archive with known good generated files. Such files are included in the pipeline and made available as artifacts as well as on the Releases page.

Permissions and Security

Seeing that I suggested adding a project setting, permissions would be consistent with the existing ones, I believe. Developers and up have permissions to create/edit/delete releases. That would be good enough for access to a flag controlling the display.
🤔 Maybe Developers shouldn't be able to access the flag but I guess it won't hurt if they can.

Links / references

Examples　of confusion: sane-project/backends#248 (closed) and sane-project/backends#313 (closed).
See also #216485 (closed).