use Perl

That's like ancient history by now. But there's a new gittorrent references file for a distribution if you don't need to be up to date. A shallow clone of blead works out to be a 16MB download. A full clone of the ~37,733 commits in the repository is about a 112MB download.

And for the record,
Com-    Pump-  Release         Date            Notes
mits    king                                   (by no means
                                                comprehensive,
                                                see Changes*
                                                for details)
================================================================================ ===

        Leon     maint-5.005      2007-Oct-02

        Nicholas 5.8.5-RC1     2004-Jul-06
                 5.8.5-RC2     2004-Jul-08
                 5.8.5         2004-Jul-19
                 5.8.6-RC1     2004-Nov-11
                 5.8.6         2004-Nov-27
                 5.8.7-RC1     2005-May-18
23,900           5.8.7         2005-May-30
                 5.8.8-RC1     2006-Jan-20
24,294           5.8.8         2006-Jan-31
25,218           maint-5.8        2008-Mar-03

23,217  Rafael   5.9.2         2005-Apr-01
25,521           5.9.3         2006-Jan-28
                 5.9.4         2006-Aug-15
29,291           5.9.5         2007-Jul-07
                 5.10.0-RC1    2007-Nov-17
                 5.10.0-RC2    2007-Nov-25
30,191           5.10.0        2007-Dec-18
30,256           maint-5.10        2008-Mar-03
30,813           blead        2008-Mar-03