Tangential question, why not just host a git repo instead of hosting the files without history?
For personal projects (including NN-512) I use Mercurial for version control, not git. But in any case I don't want the compiler (or the website it generates) to depend on git or any other version control software.
I think you have this backwards, anybody could check in the contents of your tarball into a vcs, so not sure the point...