This is really nice. I think this would work really well as a GitLab integration i.e. Use GitLab's UI when online, but store the issues in your repository so it's available offline etc.
That's my main issue with GitLab, there is so much interesting innovation that they could do w.r.t. tooling but instead they play it safe by copying Github or providing integrated services that are already possible in Github.
I genuinely feel this is not the case. GitLab is so much more - it encompasses the full DevOps Lifecycle in a single application. If you haven't checked out our homepage recently, it might be interesting for you to rediscover what GitLab offers - https://about.gitlab.com/
Full disclosure: I work for GitLab, but what I stated above has nothing to do with the fact, it's how I personally see GitLab as a product.
> GitLab is so much more - it encompasses the full DevOps Lifecycle in a single application
That's what I meant by "integrated services already possible with Github". I guess you are familiar with Github Marketplace.
I don't mean to offend GitLab, it's a great service, I just mean that it could be much more if it worked on low level things too, like storage of issues as git objects, or federated instances. These are hard problems that won't make GitLab easy sell to a manager but definitely interesting things that would get developers attention.
We have some low-level stuff on our roadmap (e.g. federated Merge Requests [1], federated GitLab instances [2], cross-platform mentions [3] - i.e. mentioning GitHub users). These didn't get prioritized yet, but it's only a matter of time. We have limited resources so we have to prioritize and scope out releases in a such a way that it advances both our vision and satisfies customer requests.
A really interesting low-level component that we created and use in production is gitaly [4] (which is a git RPC component that aims to completely remove GitLab's dependency on NFS for repository access - and replace it with gitaly itself).
