[b112]

Git repos only vanish if they have no clones.

And? You're speaking probabilities, not certainties. It's not relevant in terms of archiving. You don't guess, you don't hope, you simply 100% ensure that 10 days, 19 years, or a century from now you can build the same thing.

I agree that adding "extra stuff" to a tarball isn't a bad idea, and in fact, many already do!

[lupusreal]

If you can archive the tarball, you can archive the git repos. If for some reason you can't, you can cut your own tarballs from the git repo and then you don't have to worry about them because you made them yourself.

[b112]

Archiving an entire git repo is serious overkill, and untenable realistically. Debian has 30k packages, if not more, and some of them are the linux kernel.

My responses in these threads has been to the "why not build from git" logic championed here.

You want to build from a reliable, repeatable source. And as I mentioned, that can be git clone -> tarball, sure.