The .gitignore and .gitattributes files are changed/added so that after a "git archive", the .gitignore and .gitattributes are ommited from the created archive.
A new Make target is added that exports the currently checked out revision and packs it into a tarball with a "sane" file name and directory structure (project-version.tar.gz with single project-version directory). This tarball can be uploaded and used as a base for packaging for distributions (as with your debian and my fedora branch).
Hi, this pull request contains two small changes: