I just pushed a feature that optionally uses annotated tags to describe your project’s downloads. Check out how Rails describes their v2.3.5 release:

Ruby on Rails 2.3.5
* Improved Ruby 1.9 Support
* Compatible with the rails_xss plugin
* Fixes a bug with filtered parameter logs
* Numerous fixes to Active Record's nested attributes functionality
* Fixes to ActiveResource to be slightly more flexible when handling response content types.
* Fixes for the Nokogiri backend for XmlMini

That is a lot better than the tag’s commit message:

Make sure strip_tags removes tags which start with a non-printable character

If you’re like me and had no idea what annotated tags are, do yourself a favor and read up on them.

We also tweaked the output filename of tag/branch downloads so that they contain the tag in the file name.

OLD: rails-rails-fe0328.tar.gz
NEW: rails-rails-v2.3.5-0-gbfe0328.tar.gz

The new format is {user}-{repo}-{tag}-{n}-g{sha}.tar.gz, where n is the number of commits since the latest tag. This is taken directly from the ‘git describe’ command.