Git operations while building source release

[JamesC1]

I'm on some rebuild of Ubuntu LTS,and want junit for something unrelated. When we're done here, I'll download the source with git, like everyone else, and see how far I get. If there's a table of which versions of junit are supported with which versions of java, tht could be useful.

I have downloaded the .tar.gz source release of junit-framework-r5.13.4. Following these build instructions:
https://github.com/junit-team/junit-framework/blob/ebb561acdc79db2c26210c3bd059f349a59d1750/README.md#building-from-source
it fails quite early, apparently by doing git operations on the source release, when the source release is not a git repository. Please find some logs and my analysis so far attached.

So the question is: is there a supported way to build from the source release?

As regards preferences, I am from an earlier generation of computing, and would like to be able to build software so that, when it needs more tools, it stops to give me instructions, rather than silently
downloading things. I suspect that this horse has bolted.

git-fail-03.txt