Chad: the more you argue that it's not even worth considering, the more I'm going to push back and ask for actual numbers and facts. ;)
Alex: I admit 8 contributors is not significant, but 24,192 commits vs 104,566 commits is. The conclusion I was suggesting was "same number of contributors over a much shorter time frame".
Re: github mirror broken: note that http://php.net/build-setup.php mentions *only* the github mirror. And the github mirror has been broken for almost two months now. There's no mention of the "real" repo. That merits an exclamation mark, I think. --scott