I think a lot of it is probably historical. When debian or red hat infrastructure came up there was no git; projects were still often in source control during d

I think a lot of it is probably historical. When debian or red hat infrastructure came up there was no git; projects were still often in source control during development but tarballs were still the major distribution mechanism to normal people. Though before git they'd sometimes have packages that would be based on an SVN or cvs snapshot back in the day, in absence of releases. I believe what happens in debian is that they host their own mirror of source tarballs, since going to some random website or git repo means it could be taken down from under them. So I guess if the package is built straight from a repo they'd probably make a tarball of it anyway.