I looked at the differences between the GitHub repository and released packages. About 60 files are in a release package that are not in the repo (most are generated files for building) but also some of the .po files have changes.
That's devastating.
If you don't build your release packages from feeding "git ls-files" into tar, you are doing it wrong.
Although if I look at its documentation, it's already a somewhat complicate invocation with unclear effects (lots of commandline options). Git seems to not be able to do KISS.
git ls-files and tar is a simple thing everybody understands and can do without much issues.
That's devastating.
If you don't build your release packages from feeding "git ls-files" into tar, you are doing it wrong.