> Arch Linux as well for every package downloading tarballs from GitHub. Packages checking out the git source tree are not affected, but they are a minority. It feels like people are using git wrong.
When building distro packages from source, the full revision history of a Git repo is unnecessary. Downloading just the source code of a specific commit or tag with curl is simpler, faster, has fewer dependencies, and is less prone to breakage (well, unless your URLs change under you, as happened here).
The first time, sure. But the second time, a `git pull` should normally be significantly quicker.
Heck, you could check if the tag you want already exists in the repo you have and skip the `git pull` a lot of the time.