I'm not sure what backend you're using, but you might find it simpler to integrate Mercurial, as you can basically access it as a Python library [0].

Though, Mercurial doesn't have a particularly great git-export story, so syncing to GitHub or the like is harder. (Fossil has a better story there, with first-class git export, but a different workflow, and harder integration story (a RESTful JSON API)).

Git tends to be harder to integrate with, as there is sort of an expectation you'll maintain a shell process for it. [1]

As to zipping, with Git, you need to zip the whole repo.

Fossil can zip files upon storage, or you can zip the *.fossil file.

Mercurial can bundle with gzip, to simplify things a bit.

My point being, though git can give you some nice places for users to deploy to, it can be a bit of a pain to work with, and a couple other SCM systems might need to be considered. They might make your life a lot easier.

[0] https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/MercurialApi

[1] https://git-scm.com/book/be/v2/Embedding-Git-in-your-Applica...