[jonaf]

Speaking from an operations perspective, yes, it's a runtime dependency. From a development perspective, you might think of it as a "deploy-time" dependency. Think of it in contrast to compile errors. If your program has errors that your compiler can catch, then it will refuse to compile the program and you must fix the error before executing the program. A runtime dependency is one that may change after your program is compiled -- these are harder to test, especially when the program may fail depending on its environment. In the case of dependencies on services such as Github at deploy time, it's a "runtime dependency" for the operations programs. Since the operations programs are the ones with the runtime dependency, it's also in the operations team's purview (and responsibility) to revise their program(s) and eliminate the runtime dependency such that testing (and reproducibility of) deployment is deterministic and reliable.