Its time to address the perenniel issue open source developers face.
What we need is a way to grab patches (diffs), the project, the issue tracker URL, any tags we want to specify for it, and then finally, a way to output it to different front ends (XML, JSON, HTML) so on.
github API
pros: quicker than download full git / hg repositories
cons: only contributions made through pull requests are gathered.
version control
pros: most thorough
cons: requires (in the case of git, mercurial) downloading whole repositories, then searching them.
trackers
examples: bugzilla, github, gitlab
pros: can grab direct patches from version control where authors aren't as easy to pluck out.
Most VCS / tracking systems use VCS. For using Github API, you need to use an API token.