I haven't used --find-links yet so I may be wrong but tarring up packages and serving them by a web server is additional work that I'd rather avoid. It just creates yet another copy of the package and requires maintaining an additional server component.

--find-links can point to a local directory of packages, if that helps you.

also, in case it's not clear, you don't manually tar up packages, you run "python setup.py sdist" to generate them.