I am trying to setup the automatic generation of a nightly release on a (public) gitlab instance. The project uses the GNU Autotools and the release I want to publish is the tarball generated by make dist/make distcheck. However I experience two problems:
Gitlab adds tarballs of the files tracked in the git repository. As I think that generated files like the files generated by GNU Autotools don't belong into a VCS, this tarball is missing files that should definitely included in a release. However I haven't seen a way to turn that off.
While it is no problem to create the tarball on Gitlab via a pipeline, I don't now how to add the tarball to the release, at it seams only to be possible to attach a link. Also even if I specify only a single file (the tarball) as the job artifact, it is still wrapped inside of a zip-file, with a random name.
So I wonder:
a) Is it possible to add a custom tarball instead of the automatic one?
b) How do I add a artifact with no extra zip-file?
c) How do I add a file instead of a link to a release?
d) How can I turn off the automatic distribution of the VCS-contents?
e) Why is Gitlab using this approach/terminology? I think that a release is definitely not a copy of a VCS-repository, as it is intended to be used by the end-user not by a developer as the VCS. What is even the use off providing another way to download the contents of a repository? I could just use git clone or the download link at the frontpage.