All,
I've been responsible for moving Jetty from SCCS to RCS, RCS to CVS, CVS to SVN and finally SVN to GIT, while along the way migrating from mortbay to sourceforge, sourceforge to codehaus, codehaus to eclipse.
Experience from those moves suggests to me that moving can cause more disruption than the benefits that it gains.
I'm very content with the project being developed under the Eclipse Foundation, it has provided an umbrella organisation that has not been too intrusive in the technical development of the project, has imposed some reasonable IP due diligence and provides hosting resources that while not start of the art are capable, maintained and not far from the state of the art.
So I've got zero interest in moving the project away from the eclipse foundation from an organisational point of view.
I am however keen to accept contributions in whatever form they are given and github pull requests are a popular way to make contributions, and are well supported with collaborative tools. The project has already received 21 pull request on the github mirror and another 5 on a fork of the mirror.
In the past, we have simply rejected these PRs with a message asking for patch contribution. However, it is already possible for us to directly pull from these pull requests, so long as the contributor has signed an eclipse CLA and referred to the PR in a bugzilla. So going forward, I suggest that at the minimum we respond to PRs with a request for a CLA and bugzilla, rather than asking for the contribution to be reformed.
So my question is, will moving the canonical repository to github make this process any easier? Maybe a little bit, but not so as the contributor will notice. They will still need to sign a CLA and open a bugzilla. The difference is that the committer processing the PR will be able to click a button to get the merge rather than use command line git commands.