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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Not holding my breath, which is why I wrote github-backup. Well, also because it recursively backs up forks, and I&#x27;ve lost changes in deleted forks enough times to want to back them up automatically.