The user you're responding to is the maintainer of Magit - I would wager he has a better idea of his hosting situation than you do.

That's a statement on the level of Turnbull's "laws of Australia". I doubt the FSF would break its own policy for a new project, especially since the principle is free software over user convenience. The maintainer might want to add proprietary dependencies to their project, but under FSF control, it wouldn't happen.

Most of the packages that are distributed using GNU Elpa (i.e. the non-built-in packages under FSF control) are developed on Github.

Can you show me an example of such a package? All the Elpa packages are hosted on a Savannah instance.

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/elpa.git/tree/packag...

> Can you show me an example of such a package?

https://github.com/magnars/dash.el

> All the Elpa packages are hosted on a Savannah instance.

That's the "publishing repository". You have to push there for a new version of your package to be published on GNU Elpa. But for most packages development happens elsewhere, and in most cases "elsewhere" is Github. Emacs maintainers sometimes commit directly in the Elpa repository (and package maintainers are expected to deal with the consequences, such as "two diverging mainlines"), but development happens elsewhere.

> Emacs maintainers sometimes commit directly in the Elpa repository (and package maintainers are expected to deal with the consequences, such as "two diverging mainlines")

Is a model like this what you mean when you say "No, we would continue to use Github for the foreseeable future"? I guess if you're doing all the legwork, it won't be overly visible to other people who want to contribute. Still though...

That doesn't seem that onerous. It's just a pull and and a merge—it's what git is designed for.

Orgmode is another example.