Git-issues

I've been thinking recently about issue tracking for my various projects. No doubt a lot of it is going to happen on GitHub because that's where most open source stuff happens, but I feel like pinning my projects exclusively to GitHub is a bad idea. On a small scale, having a little TODO file or something would be fine, but what about on a larger scale?

What I'm thinking about is making a special "issues" branch, disconnected from the rest of the tree. It has one file per issue in some kind of structured format, probably JSON. That file contains data about the issue - a description, tags, etc. Comments are commit messages with optional changes, with one separate thread of commits per issue file. All the threads are octopus merged at the end and that forms the HEAD of the issues branch.

Then I could make a two-way gateway that converts GitHub issues into this format and back, and a couple of command line and web tools to use it natively. Issue nirvana!