<story><title>GitHub-backup:  backs up everything GitHub knows about a repository or a user</title><url>https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joeyh</author><text>There are a lot of different distributed issue trackers built on top of git. None widely known or used and all incompatable. If GitHub included issues and pull requests in a git repo (either in branch or in a separate git repo as they do for wikis), it would become an instant de-facto standard.&lt;p&gt;With such a standard, many new things would immediately spring up to use it. Bug reporting, and managing bug reports, and forwarding bug reports between related projects is a big pain point, largely due to the fractured mess of bug tracking systems. A thousand flowers would bloom.&lt;p&gt;The only reason GitHub has to not do this, as far as I can tell, is that keeping the issues locked in their silo makes it a little bit harder for competition to migrate repositories from GitHub. Although I hear GitLab migrates issues anyway, and the API makes this not hard (although perhaps needing lots of time due to rate limiting). And of course, they probably slapped a SQL database down on day 1 for issues without thinking too much about it, and so it would be some effort to move them into the git repo now.&lt;p&gt;Not holding my breath, which is why I wrote github-backup. Well, also because it recursively backs up forks, and I&amp;#x27;ve lost changes in deleted forks enough times to want to back them up automatically.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sytse</author><text>At GitLab we indeed have an importer for GitHub issues (so you can import repos, pull requests and wikis in one go). But issues in a git repo would be awesome. My thoughts on this are in &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gitlab.com&amp;#x2F;gitlab-org&amp;#x2F;gitlab-ce&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;4084&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;gitlab.com&amp;#x2F;gitlab-org&amp;#x2F;gitlab-ce&amp;#x2F;issues&amp;#x2F;4084&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>GitHub-backup:  backs up everything GitHub knows about a repository or a user</title><url>https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>joeyh</author><text>There are a lot of different distributed issue trackers built on top of git. None widely known or used and all incompatable. If GitHub included issues and pull requests in a git repo (either in branch or in a separate git repo as they do for wikis), it would become an instant de-facto standard.&lt;p&gt;With such a standard, many new things would immediately spring up to use it. Bug reporting, and managing bug reports, and forwarding bug reports between related projects is a big pain point, largely due to the fractured mess of bug tracking systems. A thousand flowers would bloom.&lt;p&gt;The only reason GitHub has to not do this, as far as I can tell, is that keeping the issues locked in their silo makes it a little bit harder for competition to migrate repositories from GitHub. Although I hear GitLab migrates issues anyway, and the API makes this not hard (although perhaps needing lots of time due to rate limiting). And of course, they probably slapped a SQL database down on day 1 for issues without thinking too much about it, and so it would be some effort to move them into the git repo now.&lt;p&gt;Not holding my breath, which is why I wrote github-backup. Well, also because it recursively backs up forks, and I&amp;#x27;ve lost changes in deleted forks enough times to want to back them up automatically.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jstepka</author><text>What you&amp;#x27;re after is something like Fossil;&lt;p&gt;* &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.fossil-scm.org&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.fossil-scm.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;... which is a distributed version control system that embeds issue and wiki data.&lt;p&gt;What would be a great next step for version control (similar to how we went from cvs to svn to git) would be to embed issue and PR data into the repository data structure.&lt;p&gt;I haven&amp;#x27;t worked on Git &amp;#x2F; Bitbucket in a while (at Docker now), so I haven&amp;#x27;t been tracking it very close... what would be ideal, maybe it&amp;#x27;s already there... would be to design and build on the popularity of Git with a module that stores the issue &amp;#x2F; PR data giving you true portability. Over time that module could be made mandatory giving you the flexibility you&amp;#x27;re after.</text></comment>