uscan (wget) no longer presented the same HTML as a normal browser for releases

A recent change made in how releases pages are presented to non-browsers has created problems for Debian's automatic update system (uscan).

As a bit of background, Debian uses a program called uscan to monitor upstream releases and automate the download of new tarballs. A recent change (March 2024) is causing problems because GitLab no longer presents the same HTML for a release page to uscan (or wget) as it does to a standard browser.

In most cases we have been able to work around this by using Git tags.

https://wiki.debian.org/debian/watch#GitLab

However, there are some corner cases where this doesn't work well. One example is:

https://gitlab.com/vala-panel-project/vala-panel-appmenu/-/releases

where different parts of the source code build various different tarballs. The maintainer of the project manually adds the extra tarballs to the release page, but uscan can no longer parse it because it is presented with what amounts to a login screen when it tries to access the URL above.

There is some further discussion at:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2024/04/msg00009.html

How easy would it be for GitLab to revert this behavior and serve the same HTML for all requests to releases?