[EdiX]

People like to say that github is the reason git won the dvcs wars 10 years ago, but I think this is it. I think a lot of people's first impression of git back in the day was making a local mirror of their company's svn using git-svn. Without local branches this was a pointless exercise but with git you still got some benefit even without the remote being a git repository.

[jabl]

Back in the day I was doing some GCC development while upstream was still using SVN. At that time there was both Hg and Git mirrors, and while the GCC repo isn't that huge in the grand scheme of things, it's big enough that the "standard" hg workflow of having a separate checked out tree for every local branch you're working on was definitely painful. While I had been using hg for some personal projects, this was really the killer feature that drove me to git.