I'll be honest, I was not using Pagure when I found the bug, but I was taking reference from the Pagure codebase to implement download repository functionality on a project I am working on. Pagure has been an amazing guiding angel for me while developing this project, so thank you very much to the authors/maintainers/contributors!

Anyway, the issue is as follows: when a user tries to download files from a release, the download does not contain git related files such as .gitignore, .gitattributes etc (are there any more?)

Looks like this is where the logic is to exclude ".git":
https://pagure.io/pagure/blob/master/f/pagure/lib/git.py#_3020

A possible fix could be:

def _exclude_git(filename):
    return ".git" in filename.split('/')

I'll see if I can raise a PR to make this fix, but I just felt like raising this issue to give back to something that has helped my project quite a bit.