> As others are alluding to in the comments, I’m highly skeptical of coupling the issue tracker and other non-VCS features with git. What do you mean by coupli

> As others are alluding to in the comments, I’m highly skeptical of coupling the issue tracker and other non-VCS features with git. What do you mean by coupling? Are you talking about what Gitlab Omnibus does by bundling an issue tracker and other web services along with its core git functionality? If so, you're wrong-- Gitlab's approach helps a busy maintainer get their work done without being hemmed in to a service like Github. The issue tracker's defaults are sane, non-technical users can easily sign up using the other bundled services and communicate using it, and it gets upgraded as a side-effect of upgrading Gitlab itself. If I had instead used one of your claimed "far better solutions," I'd have spent hours researching issue trackers and installing/configuring one of them. That's time taken away from developing the software I'm housing in Gitlab. Or, even worse, I'd have asked on the dev list, "what's a good, solied open source issue tracker?" And we'd have bike-shedded for 10x the time.