Since they make a repo mirror every time they pull, why don't they have a backup? Do their developers never communicate with each other? (Why are they using github as their build repo?!)

> Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that git makes hosting your own public repository absurdly complicated (http://weblog.masukomi.org/2008/03/11/sharing-a-public-git-r...) compared to other tools (http://weblog.masukomi.org/2008/03/11/sharing-a-public-darcs...).

With mercurial, you can just run "hg serve" or "hg -p [port] serve", FWIW. (That's for a read-only repo, though. There's a bit more setup involved before people can push to an http repo.)

With monotone ("mtn serve", done. Auth is taken care of at the repository level) and darcs it looks even easier.