Running the .py files directly is the recommended way on linux since the A8 release (since our codebase is pure python now), unless you use a linux distro compatible with .deb or .rpm packages.
The linux recommended zip of the A8 release candidate is here:
http://download.tuxfamily.org/makehuman ... source.zipIt depends on what you mean with old version.
The older releases are archived here, and there is always a linux tarball with sources available:
http://code.google.com/p/makehuman/downloads/listBut know that A7 and older did not consist of only python files, they require a native C executable to be built.
We do not archive every single revision in a conveniently downloadable zip file (that would require 200MB for every revision, and our current svn history counts almost 7000 revisions!) So if you are looking to download a specific revision in between releases, then no, you will have to use svn.
For very recent revisions, this is possible however. We have just migrated development to
a mercurial repository hosted on Bitbucket, which allows you to download any revision in zip format.
Check the history, take note of the hash value of the revision you want (it is in the collumn called 'commit'), and enter it in the following url:
https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman/get/your_hash_here.zip
https://bitbucket.org/MakeHuman/makehuman/get/tip.zip will get you the latest development version.