Comment by fundamental

Part of the challenge is that for issue tracking to really work for non-trivial projects is that there needs to be some web interface that allows newcomers to report issues without first obtaining commit access to the main repository. If some of the solutions can get this bit of functionality then they stand a chance of doing some really awesome things (I'd love to be able to work on and update issues while totally offline).

Right now they do still unfortunately come off as toy examples once you get to the point where their distributed nature would normally come in handy. It's a shame that the interest in the problem died down a few years back around the time you noted.