I realize that reliability is important; GitHub should improve here. However, my experience was that avoiding dependencies on an external server was the natura

I realize that reliability is important; GitHub should improve here. However, my experience was that avoiding dependencies on an external server was the natural way of working with Git-based deploys. Our deploy scripts pushed the current branch from the local repository to the servers directly. This meant that the version tested locally, whether a hotfix on a developers box or the last synced/tested version on the CI server, was the exact version deployed. Granted, the scripts could have specified the exact revision to fetch from an external server, but since the deploy source and target were already communicating, why not just `git push` and a commit hook rather than various `ssh git ...` steps? It won't scale to hundreds of boxes, but by that point you surely have a local dist source for much more than just Git repositories.