Git is a relatively large program with numerous dependencies.^1
Source code published on github.com can be downloaded without using git.
One way to do this is to download a .zip file of the source code using wget or similar from codeload.github.com.
The github.com website used to include a download link for a .zip file on repository pages.
If I am not mistaken, Microsoft has recently removed this link.  
Perhaps the reason for this has been discussed somewhere and I missed it.
Meanwhile, the following solves the problem for me.        cat > 1.sh << eof

        # usage: echo 
        IFS=/;
        read x1 x2 x3 x4 x5 x6;
        case ${x1} in https:);;*)exit;esac;
        test ${#x2} -eq 0||exit;
        case ${x3} in github.com);;*)exit;esac;
        test ${#x4} -gt 0||exit;
        test ${#x5} -gt 0||exit;
        exec FTPUSERAGENT=git/2.9.5 ftp -4vvo ${x4}-${x5}.zip 

        eof

1. For example, git from Void Linux   16 packages will be installed:

     gdbm-1.19_1 
     perl-5.32.1_2 
     perl-Digest-HMAC-1.03_4 
     perl-Authen-SASL-2.16_5 
     perl-Convert-BinHex-1.125_3 
     perl-IO-stringy-2.113_2 
     perl-TimeDate-2.33_2 
     perl-MailTools-2.21_2 
     perl-MIME-tools-5.509_3 
     perl-Net-SSLeay-1.90_2 
     perl-URI-5.07_1 
     perl-IO-Socket-SSL-2.070_1 
     perl-Net-SMTP-SSL-1.04_2 
     libpcre2-10.35_1 
     expat-2.3.0_1 
     git-2.31.1_1 

   Size required on disk:         109MB
   Space available on disk:      3560MB