Releases are GitHub's way of packaging and providing software to your users. You can think of it as a replacement to using downloads to provide software.
With Releases, you can provide links to binary files, as well as release notes describing your changes.
At their core, Releases are based on Git tags. Tags mark a specific point in the history of your project, so they're a great way to indicate a Release. Releases are ordered by a tag's date in the following way:
- If it's an annotated tag, the tag object's date is used.
- If it's a lightweight tag, then the commit object's date is used.
For more information about viewing your existing tags, see "Working With Tags."
