I think I would suggest not installing these items from source directly but rather harness the power of your package manager to still maintain these packages.
locally installing
You can use a command line tool such as curl or wget to still download the packages necessary to install them either using yum or rpm directly.
$ sudo yum localinstall some.rpm
-or-
$ sudo rpm -ivh some.rpm
I would suggest looking to the repositories RepoForge as well as EPEL for RPMs. For example the git packages are here.
A simple command in the terminal will download it:
$ wget http://pkgs.repoforge.org/git/git-1.7.10.4-1.el6.rfx.x86_64.rpm
Rebuilding a source RPM
On the off chance you have to have the latest versions, you can still make use of RPMs but rather than download the .rpm version of a package, you'll want to get the .src.rpm version. These can be rebuilt using the following command:
$ rpmbuild --rebuild some.src.rpm
Rebuilding a tar.gz using a donor source RPM
You can also take your .tar.gz tarballs and reuse the .spec file that's included in the above .src.rpm. You do this through the following commands.
$ mkdir -p ~/rpm/{BUILD,RPMS,SOURCES,SPECS,SRPMS,tmp}
Then create a ~/.rpmmacros file.
%packager Your Name
%_topdir /home/YOUR HOME DIR/rpm
%_tmppath /home/YOUR HOME DIR/rpm/tmp
Now we're ready to "install" the donor .src.rpm.
$ rpm -ivh some.src.rpm
This will deposit a tarball and a .spec file in your ~/rpm directories. You can then edit this .spec file and replace the tarball with the newer one.
Now to rebuild it:
$ rpmbuild -ba ~/rpm/SPECS/some.spec
This will create a .rpm and a new .src.rpm file once it's complete.
Additional tips
You can use the tool yum-builddep to make sure you have all the required RPMs installed before getting started.
$ sudo yum-builddep some.src.rpm
Best Answer
I would simply run the
git cloneas you've described and then delete the.gitdirectories that are dispersed throughout the cloned directory.