If it's a personal project, it's largely a matter of taste, I think. I did tarball-upload style myself before. I just like to comment that having public repo

If it's a personal project, it's largely a matter of taste, I think. I did tarball-upload style myself before. I just like to comment that having public repo doesn't necessarily mean you suddenly have to deal with issues piled up by others, although in recent trend repo providers do encourage that kind of open communication (On github, I can turn off issue tracker but I don't know how to turn off pull requests). Even using private repo, you still get bug reports, feature requests and patches via email, or (worse) stumble upon a blog or tweet complaining something isn't working for somebody. The reason I moved to public repo for my projects was that I got tired of dealing with patches manually - sometimes people sent patches against the release which was already fixed in my repo or had conflict with HEAD; sometimes I couldn't reproduce the problem so I had to send provisional patches to the user reported a bug to check out if that would address the issue. With public repo, I could just say "give me a patch against HEAD" or "I push a potential fix on a branch so check it out". It's so much easier. But again, this all depends on what kind of feedback you're getting, or how often your releases are, etc.